Farce?
Do you not agree with a moderator on an audio science review forum reminding folks that their ears aren’t a scientific instruments? Or maybe asking people to provide measurements as a re-buttle to Amir’s results instead of the repeated, “my ears tell me”, is the problem? Or is it the moderator slapping the fingers of person’s accusing Amir of having an agenda without actual proof that is the farce?
It is even worse in the ASR measurement thread. Anyone who questions them is blocked from posting. Wonder what they have to hide??? There is zero useful honest information there. The thread has also been sanitized and all the initial errors that were made in the measurements were removed. lol.
That would be a triple ‘No’ there then.
This and correct speaker placement. I am in complete amazement why those two things aren’t the first response anytime someone asks how they can improve their system. I guess because absorption panels aren’t fun to review and those guys don’t advertise enough for the sites/mags but this (being the audiophile community) is the only community that i have ever seen whose first reaction is to jump to either the highest cost or placebo option first rather than sensible advice.
@andybob correct me if i’m wrong but doesn’t the person you quoted have a vested interest in these devices? Now i share the same ignorance as you but these statements in the post you quoted are what i am speaking to above as they are full of hyperbole ie “jaw dropped the floor”. Second if it was actually so apparent it certainly wouldn’t need a 100k piece of equipment to measure as any basic tool for the purpose should be able to detect it as lets face it the crappiest measurement gear is still easily more capable of detecting differences than the our ears.
Yes, I believe that Alex C has a commercial interest in the mR. I was quoting him mainly for information because the link in AllenB’s post had come adrift, but I am interested in the possibility that Amir may have had a ground loop in his testing setup.
I appreciate that you added the quote and here very may well be a fault in the measurements but i, personally, would be more swayed if they would have responded with measurements to counter the claim rather than in the fashion they did.
My guess is it’s for a few reasons - not least that neither are simple to do, and that many people (even with high-end gear) have their hifi in their main/shared living space and is therefore impossible/undesirable/impractical to follow best practice.
Also we’ve been conditioned to like buying things and since in so many walks of life you get what you pay for, it’s hard to disassociate that with hifi - hence we buy bigger/better new toys.
This is a thread about measurements made regarding the performance of a microRendu. The conclusion appears to be that you are better off perfecting speaker placement and sorting out room treatments. OK, let me make one thing clear, I fully agree with the sentiments regarding room treatments and speaker placement. This kind of stuff is fundamentally important.
However, the microRendu is not a ‘tweak’ in the style of vibration isolators, cable lifters and the like. It is a source component. Yes, room treatment & speaker placement is important, but where does this debate end? To go back to the analogue age, if you had someone debating if cartridge A was better than cartridge B, and the answer is, ‘no, you’re better off sorting out your speaker placement’, well, this doesn’t help much. Even in the digital age, ask the question ‘does the TotalDAC D1 server outperform the Auralic Aries, is it worth the extra cash’, the answer, ‘you are better off treating your room.’ OK, maybe a fact if you haven’t treated your room, but it doesn’t answer the question. Taking this argument to it’s extreme, you could have a world where every hifi magazine equipment group test finishes with the statement ‘you are better off fine tuning your speaker placement’. OK, rant over! I guess some confusion is the thought that the microRendu is just a tweak, something to stick between your computer and your dac, rather than running your computer to the dac via USB. The microRendu can do this, but it is also a network endpoint / renderer, which is a different thing. This thread is interesting, it askes questions, is the microRendu rubbish or not? Are some of the manufacturer claims bogus or not. Are these tests valid with respect to real world performance or not? Good solid interesting questions. Whilst the answer ‘you are better off perfecting speaker placement and getting some room treatment’ may well be an absolute fact with respect to those who have not done these things, it adds very little to answering the very intriguing questions this thread has been asking. OK - rant over! (I think I’m in a bad mood today). By the way, this rant is not aimed personally at anyone, I actually agree fully with much of what has been written here. I’d just like to move the debate on, and maybe get to the bottom of the microRendu questions. After all, this is a Roon forum, and the microRendu is pretty much designed to optimise playback of music via Roon. It would be nice to get the facts straight!
We’ll have to be patient. From what I’ve read there are others that are going to perform some tests as soon as they get a unit. I doubt the manufacturer will show any numbers as they don’t really need to, it sells by word of mouth in the audiophile community.
There is no doubt the size of the unit and the function of network endpoint for Roon are great selling points, especially when you can easily hide it away if need be. Not sure if that alone justifies the price as similar can be achieved for much cheaper with a Raspberry Pi box.
So, the questions still remains, from a measurements standpoint, does it perform better than a regular computer never mind one with a certain amount of USB isolation with special USB cards etc? Does it perform better than a Raspberry Pi?
Key questions, yes, but then these will also be modulated by subjective listening tests, and that ultimately comes down to personal taste, it seems to me.
I’ve got a microRendu on order, but I think once I have it in house, I’ll try doing an attempt at a subjective A/B comparison for myself. I say attempt, because I’ll have to be comparing a RPi2/IQaudIO combo with the microRendu + Dragonfly DAC. So it’s changing more than one variable at a time. However, I can get both units feeding into my QUAD 44+405, and if I get my partner to push the buttons I can get close to blind testing. I’m curious to know which combo (if either) I will prefer.
Those are good listening tests to perform especially if your partner doesn’t tell you which is which and it can be done fast enough.
More often then not audiophile listening tests are similar to the following:
Get home from a long day of work, plug the brand new unit straight in and then proceed directly to the internet and declare it the best thing they’ve ever heard. In reality, more often then not they most likely just forgot what they heard before.
You should donate yourself to medical science immediately.
A Raspberry Pi / microRendu comparison would be excellent, as I feel the latter is in a position where it needs to justify it’s ~10x price compared to the former whilst providing a similar function (albeit that the mR is more of a total package out of the box and the RPi needs some setting up…although very little, took me 30 mins and I’m a total newbie to RPi & linux).
If you can organise 2x same model DACs and your preamp has multiple inputs of the same type you could Group a Pi, Cubox or ODROID alongside the “purpose built audiophile device” and simply have someone else switch inputs on the preamp without disclosing which is being listened to.
Note that Amir didn’t claim to measure sound quality in general, just the specific claim that the mr keeps power supply noise away from the USB output.
I’m happy with my µR. It got my Mac Mini out of my audio rack and in my opinion it sounds better than when my Mini was connected directly to my DAC. The difference in sound quality isn’t night and day, but the sound stage and dimensionality seems better to me. I’m still using the iFi power supply, but it was clear from the beginning that the iFi was just a “better than the average wall wart” power supply to keep the price point reasonable so you can upgrade power supplies in the future.
That being said, this all sounds conveniently opportunistic. Start a blog, go out and find a couple inexpensive audiophile products from tiny companies with a following and start goading them with specious measurements while avoiding any specific questions on what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. Meanwhile, don’t bother actually using the product for its intended purpose and don’t post any test results for other configurations that may show more favorable results.
I will be interested to see what the professional reviews have to say about the µR, but that won’t change the fact that it is doing exactly what I expected it to when I bought it without fail.
by whom, CA or the hifi rags? 
Ohh, and I suppose ASR are a bunch of professionals??? 
Where did you get that from?
Nice white paper on measurements from iFi over on CA: Measuring the iPOWER - Much Ado about Nothing.