What laptop for streaming?

Posted by: Mike1951 on 13 July 2015

I'm considering a laptop for streaming and carrying all my ripped CD's for replay through a NAIM DAC into the system. I'm assuming I'll need a Wifi-capable fast machine with 4g and a big HD for the CD's. Any thoughts?

Posted on: 13 July 2015 by Bart
Originally Posted by Mike1951:

I'm considering a laptop for streaming and carrying all my ripped CD's for replay through a NAIM DAC into the system. I'm assuming I'll need a Wifi-capable fast machine with 4g and a big HD for the CD's. Any thoughts?

First thought -- why a laptop? In general, laptops are optimized not to do many things you want your music source to do, such as not go to sleep, not manage power vs. performance.  Nor are they optimized for superior sound.

 

Naim DAC -- are you contemplating USB out into a USB/SPDIF converter, or optical out from the computer.

 

The Naim DAC is not very portable, so why do you need to "carry" the computer/source machine?

 

All road signs point to a Mac Mini being a much better choice than a laptop IMHO.

 

Posted on: 13 July 2015 by ljudpuff

I'm also considering this, my plan now is to buy cheap second hand 13" Macbook from 2009-2010, connect it wired to my router and store all my music on my Synology NAS, and play the music with iTunes ( through iTunes server from Synology)  

Then into Asynchronous USB dac and nait 5i, should be great

Posted on: 13 July 2015 by ljudpuff
Originally Posted by Bart:
Originally Posted by Mike1951:

I'm considering a laptop for streaming and carrying all my ripped CD's for replay through a NAIM DAC into the system. I'm assuming I'll need a Wifi-capable fast machine with 4g and a big HD for the CD's. Any thoughts?

 

All road signs point to a Mac Mini being a much better choice than a laptop IMHO.

 

I have used a Mac Mini into dac before , but the bad thing, you don't have any screen! I tried screen mirroring from another mac, but it thought it was really unreliable.

Yes you can connect it to your TV or place a ugly screen beside the Hi-Fi gear , and use wireless keyboard to control it. But I don't like that idea, I think it better to have everything in one unit.

Posted on: 13 July 2015 by Mike1951

I've got a Samsung Galaxy Note 4. I'm thinking - get a Wifi app on it and stream to a NAIM wireless device?

Posted on: 13 July 2015 by Dave***t
Is your phone rooted? If so, you can get a cheap and easy app to stream music to a Naim streamer. I used this route for Spotify before the connect feature was introduced for Naim streamers.

Otherwise, Android prohibits such operations as far as I'm aware.
Posted on: 13 July 2015 by Bart
Originally Posted by Mike1951:

I've got a Samsung Galaxy Note 4. I'm thinking - get a Wifi app on it and stream to a NAIM wireless device?

I think that maybe Bubble UPnP has a UPnP server that runs on Android(???)

 

I don't think that I've read any accounts of anyone trying to use it to serve music to a Naim player.

Posted on: 13 July 2015 by Steve J

Apart from a MuSo.

 

 

Posted on: 13 July 2015 by nbpf
Originally Posted by Mike1951:

I'm considering a laptop for streaming and carrying all my ripped CD's for replay through a NAIM DAC into the system. I'm assuming I'll need a Wifi-capable fast machine with 4g and a big HD for the CD's. Any thoughts?

Mike, for your purpose, a dedicated headless, fanless microserver would be a more suitable device than a laptop, in my view. If you are a OS X user, a mac mini is a natural choice. If you are a Windows or Linux user, tinygreenpc offers an interesting range of small, fanless and well built devices from Fit-PC. If you want an economic plug-and-play dedicated solution, check vortexbox.co.uk. Take your time to figure out what you exactly want to do and which OS and software you favour. You can try different approaches on an old machine or on a 40 EUR raspberry Pi. You might find it useful to also take a look at

 

http://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/HW/PC.htm

 

If you'll need to set up an MPD-based system (http://www.musicpd.org/), I can probably provide some advice. Best, nbpf