audio question

The short answer on sound, should you want to run it off the Mini... get a USB audio converter.

The hard part, though, is which to recommend?

I've heard good things about the Griffin iMic and PowerMic (which may be the same thing, just with an internal amp for driving passive speakers).

Anyway...

As for storage, I'm told that USB has higher CPU utilization during drive access, so Firewire's probably the way to go. LaCie's drives are good quality, though you might be able to get a cheaper and just as good system going with an external ide drive in an ide/firewire case. (Or even an ide/firewire/usb case.)

Network attached storage is cool, but it's slower than direct connection. The Mac Mini's only got a 100 mbit pipe, right?

Well, I don't want to just run it off the Mini, I want an external processing device so it'll offload the audio from the Mini, which I explained is inferior to my PC.

Thanks for the advice about the drives. I will definitely look into it.

I'm not too concerned with how fast it is. The network connection is plenty fast enough for a simple remote connection. I have iTunes for Windows up in an 800x600 window on my Mini's 1600x1200 desktop, so that part works well. If I have to keep it this way until I get a more powerful Mac with digital audio, (like whatever the Powermac Intel machines will be in a few years), then I will. I'm just looking for a possibly better solution in the meantime. (Plus, my PC is noisy. I like to keep it off when I can.)

I had no knowledge of the nVidia technology that you're talking about so I went ahead and read the tech sheet on it.

The nVidia technology looks like it's designed mostly for games. It allows a bunch of audio processing to be handled in DSP hardware without loading down the CPU.

It looks like your speakers support 5.1 through S/PDIF and TOSLINK, and have 2 channel analog inputs for just stereo sound.

Now, the audio coming out of the computer, until it hits your speakers, is digital. That means that there isn't any transmission noise and other junk that comes in through analog. The digital to analog conversion must be done in the speakers themselves.

This is where quality comes in. The quality of the d/a converters in the speakers, and the quality of the speakers themselves.

If you bought an external device for the mini that simply provided a SPDIF output in 5.1, then the sound quality would end up being exactly the same as the system you have hooked up to your PC.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what devices there are that do that, nor do I know if there exist external devices that handle DSP that would work for the mini. In fact, I'm not even sure if you could efficiently process sound on something attached to a firewire bus, for example, but that area is quite out of my ballpark. I just do audio =)

Get a 5.1 compatable device that outputs in SPDIF or TOSLINK, that hooks up to your firewire port (but USB is honestly ok too.. there are 4 channel USB interfaces out there and they work fine), and you'll be golden.

Apple sells the Airport Express, among its many features is a digital optical out port.

I'm somewhat confused as to what you mean by music, do you mean mp3 audio?

If so, just pick up one of the USB audio gadgets that's out there which people use with the Mac Mini. It will work and sound fine.

I hope you're not claiming your PC sound card does something magical to two channel music from a CD or mp3, because if you're playing digitally into a receiver the sound card doesn't really matter at all.

I suppose a sound card could support special junk from games and what not but I don't play computer games so I wouldn't know. However TOSLINK should be TOSLINK, it shouldn't matter what device you use. The whole point of digital audio is to just send the bits from the source over the receiver where the work gets done.

I was confused as well... he said that the PC card had better quality than the mini, which I could be true if dealing with analog outputs, but since the decoding is done in his speaker system, all he needs is a digital interface for the mini to get the audio data out thru toslink or spdif.

I am not sure, however, if every device that has spidif or toslink supports 5.1 streaming. I don't play games either so I'm coming at this from a DSP perspective. I can find many devices that decode audio from USB into the actual analog outputs for 7.1, but that is not what he wants because his speakers accept only 2 channel analog in, the 5.1 needs to be digital.

I can get the analog audio to play in 5 channel stereo (obviously not true stereo, really) and it sounds *okay* but obviously I'm not happy with *okay.*

MP3 audio, yes.

The point is, the digital audio from the PC into the speakers sounds much, much better than the analog audio coming from the Mini, so I was looking for an external audio processor in the realm of what is in my PC for similar sound quality. That's all.

Okay, sense makes. Just wanted to make sure you understood that what you really need here is "less not more".

The PC is sending digital output directly to your amplifier, which is ideal. This involves almost no work whatsoever on the sound card's processor.

However the Mini is converting the digital to analog, and sending the analog to your amplifier which of course doesn't sound as nice and is silly, since your amplifier has a digital input.

What you need for the Mini is not any sort of "processor" but simply a USB device which provides a digital output.

This doesn't do any "work" at all, in fact it involves less work than does the currenty analog situation. Using one of these USB dongles, the Mini won't need to use its DAC at all. The sound will go straight to the amp.

At that point, with both digital outputs being perfectly equal (for two channel music at least certainly) the only difference you'll be able to hear would be in the decoding, which is up to software.

http://www.machtpc.com/archives/2005/01/18/digital-audio-out-from-the-mac-mini/

I see. Thanks for the clarification and link. I may give that a try. :)