Pi2 Design Mercury Streamer impressions

Pi2 Mercury arrived today. It's smaller than I anticipated, and IMO the black case and lettering looks better in person than pictures:





The been bag frog that conditions my TRS adaptors is ORFAS special sauce that costs twice as much as the Mercury! Let those with ears hear...

Will be updating this post over the next week with implementation and listening impressions

 

GD internal HD nvme is a Bitch to install in volumio for mercury. Here's basic info to get it done. Let's say my example, i have windows ntfs drive i like to undock and use in mercury.(Must unplug from command bar next to time: safe remove eject icon select your device and eject since my nvme is on a usb drive case. If you don't well ntfs won't unlock it for use as you get errors on next commands.). Next login to volumio via ssh/enable it in example settings url: http://10.0.0.2/dev , click enable. Next use a ssh software to telnet to it like putty google it. login: volumio password volumio . once you got in "sudo fdisk -l" to find your ssd nvme disk and partition with largest gigabyte drive (mine was /dev/nvme0n1p3) next mount hd: "cd mnt" then "mkdir NVME", now to mount nvmedrive to NVME directory: "mount /dev/nvme0n1p3 /mnt/NVME" , "cd.." to get to root, finally then "cd var/lib/mpd/music" then finally "ln -s /mnt/NVME /var/lib/mpd/music/INTERNAL" . Now go to your setting, sources, and scan. Need basic a basic geek to get through this but well worth the hassle to get both functionality to pull drive out to pc and drag files in and out with windows machines. 6 hours of work, send me a beer [email protected]

 

^^^Sh!t man. Thats a lot, nothing too difficult, but alot to accomplish something so simple.

I did find that running any OS from a usb drive is much faster than an SD card, so I am currently running 64bit Raspberry Pi OS with Jriver 29. Running Pi OS from a SD card was so slow it was borderline unusable. A full sized SSD is supposed to be even faster but I don't think I want an internal NVME AND and external SSD just for the OS.

There is also Berry Boot, but the bootloader needs to be on a SD card (not sure if it can run from a USB drive). But after using the USB drive, I'm not going to return to using an SD card for anything.

I may end up just running the OS from a USB drive and using the internal NVME for storage only. .

 

When moving drives between Linux/*nix and Windows, I have always resorted to exFAT instead of NTFS. Maybe even FAT32. I'm guessing that this is a large capacity NVME?

 

Apologies if I missed elsewhere, but has anybody directly compared the Pi2AES with the Mercury? I assumed impressions might be in here or the Pi2AES impressions thread, but didn't see anything. Would be curious to hear from folks who have heard both.

Edit: Of course after posting I found this: https://www.superbestaudiofriends.o...go-rpi-aes-streamer.10471/page-39#post-389556. Still curious to hear from others.

 

I think the PI2 Mercury is subtly better than the PI2 AES but I have to admit the DIY look of the PI2 AES case wasnt to my liking.

I still use my PI2 AES on my Kef LS50W2s in my bedroom and with it hidden behind my TV its fine. 64Bit version of Ropieee sounds better to me on both the PI2 AES (PI4 8GB) and Mercury and was probably a bigger difference than the difference between the PI2 AES and Mercury.

Regards Andrew