totaldac D1 server

[GuillaumeB]

Bit of an update on my totaldac and ROON journey.

As some of you will recall some time ago I ordered a sonicTransporter (sT), the idea being to run ROON server on a dedicated headless box that is "always on". In the end I opted for the version with 1TB of SSD which was a lot cheaper than the equivalent Mac Mini. I had been thinking about moving away from HDD drives for a while so this felt like I was killing two birds with one stone.

It took absolutely forever to copy my music from my NAS to the sT as I couldn't find a male to male USB cable so had to do the whole thing using OSX Finder, not exactly the most efficient way! But copied it is! 

Moving ROON from my Macbook AIR to the sT couldn't have been any easier really. Everything was done through ROON on my iPad, that is managing all the preferences. the Totaldac d1 turned up in the Audio settings as a ROON ready device, all I had to do was give it a Zone Name. I didn't even have to do any scanning of music since this all happened whilst migrating the data from NAS to sT. When I first setup the MacBook AIR this took ages.

So the important bit! How did it sound? In a word: brilliant!   I'm not sure if this is due to the SSD or RAAT protocol but there did seem to be a marginal improvement in SQ. In any case absolutely as good as AIR 3 and possibly better. If we are to use AIR 3 beta as the new benchmark.

As promised a while back I managed to get my hands on a couple of Entreq grounding cables to try out, these are Eartha cables with USB plugs at one end and spades at the other. The spades connect directly to the ground box. It's never an exact science with Entreq since so much experimentation and patience is required, sometimes it works and other times it clearly doesn't and more often that not requires time to settle in. I started with the Challenger version (matching the Challengers I am already using with NAS and Draytek switch). 

I let the music play for a while. Several tracks in I found the same old Entreq effect - for want of a better word a "softening" of the sound, where some of the harsher edges of the higher frequencies just mellow out a bit. But I'm simplifying since I think something more profound happens that I've never been able to pin down. The resulting effect is that I start enjoying the music rather than feeling the need to critically evaluate. 

So overall I think I'm in a good place now. Good SQ, great control point and no need to boot up my Macbook AIR (which quite frankly I don't really like doing when it comes to playing music). 

Guillaume