Finally bought a Mini Mac!

I used the Hi-Face with my Mac Mini and it made a improvement to the sound in my opinion . There is also another cable , the name of which escapes me , but that is around £300 rather than the £100 of the Hi-Face .There are a few hints on the Amarra web site about getting the best out of your Mini ( what to turn off etc )  .
Personally , I wanted to listen to streamed music , BBC radio and Spotify through the Mini and in the end it was a bit faffy because I was using screen share from my laptop or a VNC app through my iPhone which my Wife never got the hang of . Therefore I switched back to a Sonos which has a much more user friendly interface controlled through my iPad .
Don't get me wrong though , for music the Mini is very good and is able to play Hi-Res downloads as well , in fact my Mini is currently doing great service with a Friends Naim 500 series system . Sounded fantasic without the high-face but linked up to the Rega DAC .

Which DAC are you using with it and is your music library in the Mac or on a NAS ?

Ed

Cheers for the reply Ed, everything is stored on a nas (well windows home server) and the mini is feeding into a supernait.

tbh its likely I will bootcamp the minimac as I much prefer win7 to OSX. So I guess the real question for me is which is the ideal usb to spdif converter, which is looking to be the hiface.

Never understand why people buy a Mac to run Windooze on it..... I have to use Windooze occasionally at work on my Mac (Parallels) but I would never choose to do so.

Because the hardwear is pretty, the reason most people buy macs.

Not wanting to start a debate about it, but I guess its all down to taste, I have always had Macs and preferred Mac OS for years until Win7 appeared, and for me peronally there no compettion for audio, dbpoweramp and foobar WASAPI. Until the current Mac Mini came out it was always a struggle intergrating one into a home cinmea with the lack of HDMI (yes I knoiw there are alternatives, but my htpc had one 3+ years ago) and its lack of processing power for 1080p until now.

I am also shocked that Win7 runs alot faster than OSX on the one I have infront of me, albeit with only 2gb ram (willup grade to 8gb and ssd), OSX feels about as responive as Win7 running on an Atom (which in fact is acceptable).

Occean ,
Why not . It's your system and if you prefer Win 7 to OSX then that's what you should use . I've just deleted my Bootcamp partition on my iMac after all these years because I no longer need XP , mind you XP was a bit old .
It is great fun stripping down the Mini to upgrade the memory and hard drive . I just followed the iFixit pages . With the new mini's having an HDMI port it adds an extra string to it's bow too .

Ed

P.S. The other cable I was thinking of is the Halide Design Bridge which is an asynchronous USB to S/PDIF converter .

Cool idea.  Running Windows 7 on Mini so you can have your cake and eat it too.  Clever.  I do love the form factor of the little Mini and having it at the business end of a hifi makes a lot of sense.  Using it to go online to purchase music to store on a NAS drive then streaming it on a network to a Qute or NDX....I'm getting it.
To be honest, finding a UPnP player that worked reliably well on a Mac has been a pain but using it with Windows makes the whole thing much more tenable.

Thanks for the idea!

Why on earth would you get a mini only to run windows on it?

I get that the design is top notch, but a much less expensive, and much more capable mini PC could be had for much less money and hassle.  I honestly have never seen (and I have had people try) EAC or Foobar work in Windows on a Mac.  It was tried two different ways (bootcamp and something else), on THREE different Macs controlled by full computer dorks, and everytime it either crashed or froze either on install or run.

-patrick

I too have just got a Mac Mini having used a Macbook Pro which seemed like a waste. The Mini is running headless and is controlled by a lovely VNC App on my iPhone if I need to adjust anything or help a rip along...... 
Great stuff !!
I'm currently trying Amarra on a 2 week trial. I'm liking the subtle things it does to the sound on most albums but I do find it very clumsy to use.... 
My DAC is an M2Tech Young which is outstanding value for money IMHO. There are a couple of clipping issues with the initial shipments but the dealer is replacing soon.

It is a small PC.  Google search "Asus EEE"

Some version have CD/DVD drives, some dont.  Most/all have spdif output.  Most have HDMI.

Typically they are set-up to allow hidef video playback.

The ones I have heard were no louder or quieter than a Mini (which is NOT silent btw).

You can buy (with Windows & installed) in most cases for less than a Mac Mini.  If you add the price of Window 7 to a Mac, they get even more exorbitant.

Lastly, not sure of the RAM and other specs, but the two Mac minis I have played with extensively were really slow with many swirling balls.

The Mac Mini is cool but it gets expensive as you make upgrade RAM and hard drives, etc.  I would not usually dissuade someone from getting one...  But seeing you want to use Windows a mini PC seems like an ideal solution.

Just my 2 cents.
-Patrick

pcstockon, not really sure why you have reported problems with EAC on a mini mac, as most over the last few year are just PC hardware with Apple Software. Running bootcamp is no different than running windows on a non apple PC. For me it all works exactly as it should.

Why did I not go with a mini PC? Well in all reality, the mini mac looks awesome and the hardware spec was right, not I am still not sure I am 100% happy to drop my ESI Juli@! Cost wis, yes it is a little more, but in the grand scheme of Naim, not a lot more. I paid just over £500 and a lesser powered Acer Revo was just over £300 with no ripping drive. Also its is quite hard to get the same kind of spec in such a small form factor with PC, belive me I have tried! The apple is running dual core 2.4 which has alot more power than atoms. (I am a great fan of the acer revos btw - have helped a number of people set them up in their systems)

Occean,

I cant say why there were issues...... EVERY TIME i run into the seemingly rare person who runs windows on a Mac, I ask them to try to install and run EAC, and Foobar.  Neither have worked three different times.

Two of them were unwilling to let it go and tried a couple of different things to no avail.

FWIW, this was 2-3 years ago, not on Mini's (to my knowledge), and I cant comment on which method they used to get into Windows, e.g. Bootcamp, Parallels, or whatever the various methods are.

Trust me.  I really dig Apple's industrial design.  I just dont like the Mac OS (although iOS deserves a Nobel Prize).  if I could EASILY run Windows EXCLUSIVELY on a Mac I would own a few Minis.

-p

In a world where you can have OSX or Ubuntu people still prefer the train wreck that is Winows 7 .... Next you will be explaining why gravel tastes better than fillet steak!



Tog

How else am I to use my favorite software, JRMC, Foobar, EAC, Tag and Rename, Album Art Downloader, dbPoweramp Batch Converter etc?

The only software I use regularly that will run on OSX is VLC.

Aaaaaaaand, I simply dont like OSX, sorry..... just like you dont like Windows.  To each their own.  We can agree though that Apple Hardware is sexy.

-p

Hmmmm


Tog