[Gopher]

I just picked up a Macmini and am borrowing a friend's Audiophileo2 in hopes of seeing if I preferred a Mac based music server to Squeezserver which has been problematic for me for a while.  A major motivator for this is that I understand my current DAC (Metrum Octave) should sound much better with 16/44 materials upsampled to 88.2khz due to its design.

I tried the Audiophileo2 briefly with an old Macbook pro running OSX 10.6 using a generic USB on Saturday and it sounded really good--nearly as good as my modified Squeezebox and that was with next to no optimizations, 2gbs of ram on a core duo machine running Pure Music...  I expected the Macmini i5 w/ 4gbs of ram, Pure Music and my Wywires USB cable to be a big step forward, but things sounded weird and wrong--I'd even run Larry Moore's optimizations on the Macmini but I still didn't like what I heard.

I *know* a macmini can sound better then this, even with the stock PSU--so my question is:  what do I need to do differently?  Can someone point me in the right direction for optimizations for OSX 10.7?

[avta]

I'm not a user of Pure Music but be sure the Audio Midi settings are correct. Unless otherwise controlled you have to re-set them each time you play a music file unless it's being controlled by another program. What problems were you having with Logitech software?

[Atlplasma]

The Pure Music documentation includes some guidance on optimizing your mac. See page 5 (if viewing the doc for releas 1..

[Gopher]

avta,

I believe they are correct, or at least I did with them what Larry Moore's tutorial suggested. 

Squeezeserver crashed for me almost every time an apple file came on.  FAAD.EXE crashed despite uninstalling and reinstalling squeezserver a thousand times.   I'm temporarily using the Macmini as my squeezeserver host and I don't crash anymore which makes me wonder if whatever is broken would be remedied with a fresh Windows install on my desktop....

Just the same the appeal of the macmini is largely to do software based upsampling to feed my Metrum Octave as its my understanding that this is when it sounds best.  There certainly is a huge gap between redbook and high res with this dac.


Atlplasma,

Thanks--i'm going to their webpage right now to search for their optimization tips.