A little advice for building a laptop based music server

[Audioseduction]

For a laptop I recommend a I5 or I7 CPU with 8GB of RAM, SSD, USB 2.0 port and a USB 3.0 port.

Both ports have their on BUS so you get much better bandwidth. Plug a ext. USB 3.0 Hard Drive into the USB 3.0 port and plug your DAC or converter into the USB 2.0 port. If you use 2 of the same port type you are then sharing a BUS which can cause interruption in the signal path which can cause jitter and is not a good thing for your SQ.

This arrangement will allow you to play your tracks from RAM. So another words your laptop becomes a memory player which will give you SOTA play back performance.

Advantage of a (SSD) Solid State Drive is no mechanical induced vibration at all. It also produce less heat. I'd suggest to go with Windows 7 64bit and JRiver Media Center 17 such a SOTA combo!

In a nutshell, USB 3.0 promises the following:

*Higher transfer rates (up to 4.8Gbps)
*Increased maximum bus power
*New power management features
*Full-duplex data transfers
*Support for new transfer types
*Backward USB 2.0 compatibility

Oh, the other half of the equation for SOTA play back is a good DAC.

[joeinid]

Thanks George!

What is the Motorola device behind the Pass remote in the bottom picture?

[Audioseduction]

Originally Posted by joeinid

Thanks George!

What is the Motorola device behind the Pass remote in the bottom picture?

It's the Motorola Xoom Android Tablet.

Details here... Click for more info...

[joeinid]

Originally Posted by Audioseduction

It's the Motorola Xoom Android Tablet.

Thanks!