totaldac D1 server

[GuillaumeB]

Sounds like you're impressed, Guillaume - is it a keeper, then?

Hmmm I fear so! As much as I love the ARIES LDS interface and flexibility with UPnP this clever (big!) box just does something really quite special.

I was impressed the instant I played the first track. It's literally in a different league, which I suppose you would hope given its (high!) price tag.

Set up was a little bit fiddly though... but it's all working perfectly now (phew!). You have to rename your NAS (which can do funny things to computers which connect to it) and creating a new shared folder (and dumping 30GB of music in it) pushed my RAID 5 into overdrive (all evening yesterday) causing the odd dropout... at first I couldn't get the music to play even though it showed up in the MPaD app on my iPad. Turned out I needed to go into the IPeng 7 app first and inside this app disable audio output... since this option prevents MPaD from reading files... Of course all this is explained in the manual which I hadn't bothered to read properly (I assumed I would only need to go into IPeng to use streaming services such as Qobuz). So not quite the plug and play of the ARIES and LDS but I got there in the end!

The MPaD app on my iPad is surprisingly good. It's a bit quirky in its operation (for e.g. you need to manually update the database and refresh local cache) after you upload new music files to the NAS... it also took me a little while to figure out why some album artwork wasn't showing although that's all fixed now though! There is an iPhone version of the app called MPoD which seems to work fine, but I prefer using the iPad app at the moment. MPaD seems to be very responsive and reliable so far.

(As an aside, at the moment I'm only using it to stream but it's also a reclocker accepting USB, AES/EBU. S/PDIF and optical inputs. So you could connect a CD transport to it for example. Will also try feeding it USB from my Mac to see how that compares).

Guillaume