Is my MacBook Air limiting my audio quality?

Audio Gear Talk
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I have my MacBook Air set up as my Roon server, running Tidal. The signal passes from the Mac by USB to my Geshelli J2 DAC which delivers to Superphon pre.
Using Roon I stream from Tidal via wifi and from a local SSD where my ripped cds live.

Question, is my Mac limiting the audio quality in this scenario? Would I be better off with an actual streamer, like the Roon Nucleus, or any other compatible units like Wiim etc?

Thanks

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Nope.

/10char

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Ok cool. Any limitations you can see?

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Your MacBook Air isn’t holding the music back. If Roon shows a purple “lossless” signal path, the bits that reach your Geshelli J2 are as pure as anything a pricey Nucleus would send.

Where a dedicated Roon box can help is in day-to-day convenience and a little extra peace-and-quiet for your DAC:

Always-on, no babysitting – A fan-less Roon Core can stay up 24/7, so your music keeps playing when you close the laptop or wander off.
Less electronic chatter – Moving the computer (and its possible noisy power supply) off the audio rack means less hash travelling down the USB cable. Some systems sound a shade cleaner that way.
More headroom – If you ever dive into heavy DSP or build out multi-room zones, the extra CPU grunt is nice.

Cheapest way to test the waters is keep the Mac as the Core and slip a tiny Roon-Ready streamer (Wiim Pro, Raspberry Pi, etc.) between your network and the DAC—about €100 and zero IT drama. If you don’t hear a difference or need the convenience, you’re done. If you love it, you can always step up to a Nucleus later.

If the Mac isn’t stuttering and you’re not hearing hum with the volume cranked, relax and enjoy the music. Otherwise, try separating the Core and the DAC first—it’s the bang-for-buck move before splurging on bigger boxes.

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Lots of opinions here. You’ll find people putting LPS on their nucleus. I do not speak for everyone.

However… if you are getting the playback in your chain that you expect (ie no drop outs, stutters, clicks) then my advice would be to invest in any other portion of your chain before your core - from an audio perspective.

However, if you want the computer for something else and you want your core to airways be on, just spend $136 and put ROCK (actually MOCK) on one of these.

I increasingly think that:

  1. People should use whatever they want as a core
  2. But if people want dirt simple and dedicated and they don’t have large libraries or do a lot of dsp, they should use a very very cheap nuc-box like the above
  3. And if people want lots of control and/or want to harness a much more powerful machine, they should install Roon server on Linux
  4. And people who want a piece of audio equipment should buy a nucleus
  5. And effectively 1-4 are functionally equivalent
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Sorry, I missed something above.

  1. Running your core on your MacBook Pro isn’t limiting your audio quality. It might be a pain, or might not be as responsive as you want, or any of a million different things.
  2. However, connecting your DAC straight to your MacBook might be limiting your audio quality. A cheap streamer (like an RPi) might make a substantial improvement. You have a nice DAC, feeding it straight out of your Mac isn’t what I’d call “best practice” though many do. If you don’t like it, repurpose the RPi. If you want to start off simple and you’re not using HQPlayer or sending super high nitrate stuff, you can use a pretty low-standard RPi. My bedside rig uses a Pi Zero W2 (yes, yes, over WiFi, I have nice WiFi, WiFi causes all kinds of issues — unless it doesn’t).
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