USB streamers...aurender, auralic, sonore etc...anyone getting into this area?

Good luck with that, the Gungnir Multibit is.. rather popular. They tend to barely touch the ground before they sell. I'd still hang on for a bit until Schiit get whatever the hell it is they're sitting on out and on sale, though- it might help inform your decision.

(I'd have snapped up a used 230V Gungnir Multibit if I ever saw a deal on one, believe me )

Hmm, on the other hand, Hifiberry do say:

"Note that the output transformer is shielded. To make sure the shielding works, your DAC needs to be grounded. If you’re unsure, we recommend the standard version."

...which would probably rule the pro out for coax use with something like a Modi Multibit, which just floats.

 

While my solution isn't very hifi, I've used a chromecast audio + toslink into a modi 2 uber and a plex server on my desktop and was quite happy, given the cheap price of entry. It's quite cheap, and it's easy to upgrade the different parts if you're unhappy Imo.

 

Use an iFi SPDIF purifier to connect Chromecast into coax of Modi and it will make a huge improvement. Lots o' jitter in the Chromecast Audio.

 

While the Chromecast Audio does, indeed, have jitter issues (it's the only device I've ever seen light up the "Buy Better Gear" light on Schiit's DACs), I'm not sure it's good advice to spend $150 for an S/PDIF purifier to fix the output of a $30 source that's driving a $150 DAC.

 

It sounds just as good streaming as my RPi 2 with Digi +, however using Chromecast is a much better interface since it is built in to Tidal and Spotify.
What would you advise instead? My lowly ModiMB doesn't have the buy better gear light.

 

For the case in question, any of myriad $20-$30 TOSLINK -> COAX converters will do the job well enough.

Sure, the iFi S/PDIF Purifier will do it better (though I'd wager you couldn't tell the difference between the $20 converter and the iFi unit in the posters particular setup), but not to the extent that it's going to be worth spending as much on tweaks as was spent on the DAC. It's not going to make a Modi Uber into a Modi MB (etc.).

In your case, you're using a Modi MB ... and it makes a bit more sense there; for a Plex user though ... I'd probably go for a Digi+ Pro in place of the Digi+ on a Pi ... but that's an entirely different solution and skill level.

 

To that end, I experimentally threw together a Digi+ Pro and a Pi 3, hooked it up to a Modi MB via coax last night, and it works well, it seems really clean. If you want an easy install that "just works", Moode supports the Digi+ Pro out of the box, and just needs to be selected via the menus, full details under "AUDIO DEVICE SETUP" here.

It's not hard to do, and virtually impossible to beat for the price, I expect. I paid £81 for the Pi 3, the Digi+ Pro and a case (inc shipping). Admittedly, I already had a memory card kicking around to put in it, but that only adds a tiny bit to the price- the whole thing could still easily come in under £100.

If you have a NAS full of FLACs or similar on your network, and want a low (electrical and acoustic) noise and reasonably low-jitter player, it seems like a bit of a bargain.

One gotcha that I'm currently chasing, though, is that you may not be able to use the RPI's onboard Wifi, due to weird harmonics from the clock generator on the i2s bus. I thought they fixed this on the DAC+ Pro, so that'd be a disappointment. It works fine with a cheap external Wifi stick though, although that makes it less tiny and neat. I'll drop Hifiberry an email to see if this is supposed to be the case on the Digi+ Pro too.

 

@Kattefjaes
So I have been doing some thinking after your teachings. I'm going to buy a lot of CDs, that's what I have always done. I just got a 180 day FREE Tidal sub, but the sound is not the same with the Tidal software as my FLAC rips. My rips blow away Tidal.

Anyway. If Coax is better than USB.... then what do you think of the Cambridge Audio CD transport or the Cambridge Audio 651C CD player buying it used. They both seem to have a good transport system and this S3 servo (looks good in pics). The 651C has a better power supply. Just thinking that if I wanted a little better sound.... I would pop in a CD and listen. And I can still keep my tablet with me at my chair. Seems like if I was going to spend money, this would be going in a direction that makes sense to me. I'm a Windows7 and Windows10 kind of guy. You couldn't pry me away from the OS. Or I could just get the $299 NAD CD player that everyone likes.

Then I thought of one more alternative......
PC build. I have been stocking up on parts to build a new Win10 Desktop. Including a Asus Xonar D2 sound card with Coax out. Only thing left needed is motherboard, memory, cpu. Anyway that stuff would be $500 to complete system with OS. Now that's exactly how much the Cambridge Audio CD player would cost. Then there would be the cost of the touch-screen monitor. Dell has a nice 22" touch-screen for $279 that would sit nice next to me easy chair. My only worry is that my significant other will slice my throat with this ridiculousness.

So the crux is..... For $279 extra dollars I could have everything....... PC that plays CDs, Coax CD or FLAC playback with Modi Multibit, and plenty of storage for FLAC with my 2TB drive. I could put silent fans in the case and use the Intel integrated graphics.

I have over spent already from what my original goal was to make the Martin Logan ESLs sound their best. With that said...... I will probably wait to go Coax, but it will happen because I can pull it off. Right now it's time to get a game plan, then 6 months from now.... let's do this.

Gungnir Multibit just seems unobtainable at the price it is new. As it stands... I have a Vincent amp coming to replace my NuPrime on Wednesday. I'm a happy boy and can't wait to hear better sound. My Morrow Audio cables are in the mail coming sometime this week as well. Thank you for all your help. I am very grateful.

 

Coax is only marginally better than optical- and then only if the clocks are good, and the connection electrically clean. You can make things worse by using a bad coax connection.

Regarding Cambridge Audio, almost everything I've had from them has failed spectacularly in different ways. Personally, and I stress that's all this is, I'd be inclined to avoid them. I don't know if their QA or build quality is terrible, or it's just my luck.

I don't want to get into a discussion about building PCs, that's an exhausting rabbit hole. My old crate is somewhat noisy, and mostly used for 3D gaming and video editing. If I want quiet, I turn it off. Silent fans aren't, by the way.

I would say that whatever you do, I'd strongly recommend moving all your FLACs onto an inexpensive NAS that you back up easily, and place far from your listening area if you want. It's a really inexpensive thing, compared to what a major reduction in hassle it is. Here's an example:

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/storage/91181-synology-ds216j/

Something like that with a couple of WD Red drives works well. You'd be mirroring them (to make it more robust), so a couple of 3TB drives would give you a shade under 3TB, once formatted. It has a couple of USB3 sockets on the back, so you can easily back it up to an external USB3 drive.

Once you have all your music on a network drive, you can share them read-only to whatever clients you have in your home- be that desktops, laptops, streamers, tablets or anything else.

 

If you do not want to use a NAS, just re-purpose a old PC and install something like Daphile there.

 

If you are going to back up the music on an external USB3 drive, then why not run in RAID 0, get better speed (might be cool if you have several people listening in different rooms to different tracks) and more disc space? It seems to me that for music, where once you load up the data doesn't change much, this would be a better solution?

 

Not really. You're throwing away fault tolerance without gaining speed. Mirrored, a cheap NAS like that can more or less saturate its gigabit ethernet port- you'll get over 100MB/sec easily. In any case, read performance is generally fairly equivalent in RAID 1 compared to RAID 0- only writes are occasionally slightly slower.

 

RAID is about availability and that is a different objective than backup. If the only thing on the NAS drive is static storage like a music library, then the need for availability is pretty low and RAID 0 might not cost you much more than hassle rebuilding the volume if the disk crashes. You would indeed throw away fault tolerance and your gain would be more file space. It might matter what else is on the NAS. My own NAS contains all of my data including security cameras and I need it to have excellent fault tolerance. In fact, I have two Synology NAS units in a high availability cluster in RAID 5 with an external backup to both hard disk and cloud storage. RAID 5 implements block-level striping with parity data distributed across all of the drives so it provides data redundancy more efficiently than RAID 1. The best RAID choice might depend on more than just keeping the tunes running. I would rather have one high-functioning (reliability + speed) NAS system than a bunch of single use boxes to deal with. My NAS has been live for three years now with no upsets that it could not handle on its own. I did have one drive die early on (WD Red) and it sent me an email and told me which drive to change. Hot-swapped it and let it go about rebuilding the array.

You can cut the wires to my house and come into my computer closet and beat the NAS unit to death with a baseball bat while the hidden 2nd NAS takes care of the data duties and takes pictures of you and sends them off to the cloud. Oh, and the tunes will keep playing through the whole ordeal.

 

Probably pointing out that RAID 5 is spawn of the devil is outside the scope of this thread. However, I do agree with a lot of the rest of it.

Though for most people, an inexpensive two drive NAS with a mirrored setup is more than enough for home storage. With the price and size of disks these days, it's not expensive to deploy a few TB like this, and it's a simple way to avoid disasters, without having to invest a ton of time and money.

We don't want to scare people off while trying to tempt them to impose some sanity on their storage- by telling them that they need to become a data centre

 

This subject has really gotten some interesting angles.

Storage is never a problem with me. I was a graphic designer for 14 years. I know all the tricks of backup and storage. I have my FLAC files in 6 drives.

Let's get back to better sound. So Coax can be better than USB, but it has to be done right. Seems to me that if I buy a used CD transport and run Coax for sometimes to get better sound.... that would be the cheapest upgrade of my sound system.

I'm running a 10ft USB cable now to the Modi Multibit. Is there a better cable than a good standard Belkin. I have a Belkin Gold, but it is not long enough to reach my chair.

Right now I have Morrow Audio cables coming for Modi Multibit to Freya..... and Freya to Vincent amp. These are supposed to be a substantial upgrade to my Audioquest Evergreen cables. I have their entry cables coming, and I can trade in for their reference cables for 50% off. That's the plan. Morrow MA4 Reference cables, I hear are freakin' amazing. 2 pair will end of costing me $250 when all is said and done.

As you can see.... I'm putting out some serious coin. The payoff is really starting to materialize into sound that I have heard before. I wanted that sound so bad. Now that I'm old, retired, I feel I deserve to go for it a little bit and finish the system that I started 5 years ago. That's a Martin Logan kick ass sounding system. Thanks everyone for all your help. Means so much to me. Dennis

 

There's no guarantee that a CD player will have low jitter. There are good and bad units.

This might be an interesting read:

http://www.jitter.de/english/soundfr.html

Note that my lowish-jitter source cost me about £100. I don't have a massive budget to spend, but I do like to maximise my bang for buck.

 

Any brand suggestions? I'm in no rush, and can look at the used audio websites for a unit. The cheapest new I know of that might be decent is the NAD C 516BEE CD Player for $299. I know some like that one. But used I think might offer more bang for the buck.

I'm familiar with jitter. bad dog.

 

I can't believe that the jitter reducer in the article about jitter ALTMANN UPCI costs $1,200 Euro. I went to see how much one costs. Almost fell over.

 

None at all, sorry. I am still enjoying the subtle but pleasant sonic upgrade from my tiny £100 wireless streaming box driving my DAC. You'll have to ask someone else who knows about good-quality CD transports.

The point of the article isn't to make you want one of those things, by the way.. don't want one of those things! It was more just that it had a nice little discussion of the effect that jitter can have.

 

Tonight. Setting up the 2nd REL S3 sub into the system and removing the Martin Logan Dynamo 1000 from the equation. 2nd sub brought broken. Seems like the only thing wrong with it is the Speakon connection. The RCA connection works fine. Steal for the price I got it. Holy moly. Anyway my room needed 2 of these REL units in the place where I sit them. According to REL.... sit the subs in the corner. Can't do that. I have someone in my family that I will annoy if I do corner of the room. They are sitting 4 feet away from that location. I would hear complaints all day long if I was playing at any reasonable volume level.

So I came to the conclusion that 2 REL S3s would be the solution to my enigma. Oh yes it was. I have a new amplifier coming on Wednesday. There is only RCA inputs on it and I will have to re-tune the subs to the new amp. Twice the power with the new amp. Right now the sound is astonishingly accurate. I'm going to spoil myself with the amp that I have wanted for years. I got it for half price, just broken in from an audio salon in northern California. OMG. This is time for a party. I'm not hating it for doubling the price of money spent to finally finish my system. This is what I used to sell to all my clients. Real sound. Can't believe that I actually own what those rich F^#$kers I used to design for had. Just starting to sink in. Nice feeling.