Yes it does seem like a very attractive case
Yeah I’ll experiment with my MacBook Pro first and see at which point IN room correction and upscaling the fans come on. It will give me a good benchmark. If I can locate the NUC in another room using my Orbi satellite back haul to the base in the living room then I’ll have a Low cost solution.
My MBP’s (tested 15 and 16" models) tend to have a cleaner usb output (on a dragonfly red dac) compared to a NUC. A mac as an enpoint passes for me (silent fan, clean enough in terms of USB output). A NUC did not…
That’s a very interesting and useful piece of info mate. I’ll likely have it as a core only and located in my office connected to a satellite and have my DAC linked to a bridge in the living room connected to the Orbi base station That’s assuming the back haul is up to the task. The only reason I’m thinking of the NUK is because it seems the best sound quality comes from a dedicated unit for the core with minimal background processes vs an electrically “noisy “ unit like a laptop. I guess that like most things in this hobby, you have to listen for yourself and decide what you’re capable of hearing and the price: performance balance.
1 Like
Your usecase seems near optimal then: compute isolated on the NUC, who is stashed away and using network connection to feed the RAAT stream to your Bridge and into the dac. An Orbi should be well up to the task unless you use wireless backhaul in a situation with much drywall or wifi unfriendly materials. With a wired setup you are certainly fine.
If you have the option to do both: some bridges seem to have even cleaner sound if you feed them through Wifi instead of cable. Orbi’s are rather powefull so you might have a better experience on wifi since the connection should be really strong. Wifi boards generate noise, but ethernet switches as well, so pick your poison…
Good luck!