JR or Media Monkey

Website update It is now just www.soundsciencecat.com

audioguy said:

A friend of mine recently borrowed a music server called the Music Vault Diamond (http://www.soundsciencecat.com/). We compared it against the very expensive dCS Scarlatti transport, the dCS Paganini Transport (both of which were loaned to him by dCS with the rest of the stack as well) and my older version of the Qsonix server (Q110). We used the dCS DAC's for all comparisons.

The Diamond sells for $3300 plus another $200 if you want the Operating Systems to run from electronic memory versus a hard drive.

NO CONTEST. Not even close! The Music Vault presented CD's the very best I have ever heard and by a very, very large margin. The Qsonix was certainly close to or the the equal of the two dCS transports but after hearing the Music Vault, I am hooked on that level of audio quality. For what it's worth, I did this "blind" as my friend had all of the equipment in his equipment room that is behind his music room.The Qsonix has an upgrade that incorporates the Wadia digital technology and may be the equal of the Music Vault but I have not heard it. But the upgrade cost would be higher than the incremental price if I sold my Qsonix and bought the Music Vault. Which is how I am leaning.

That said, however, the user interface of the Qsonix is truly incredible. I have looked at Media Monkey and will try to look at JR, both of which are supported by the Music Vault. Neither of these is even in the same ballpark of user friendliness compared to the Qsonix interface.

For those of you who have tried either or both, sonics notwithstanding, which would you recommend and why?

Also, I have the sound of the server feeding into our family room upstairs. What easy to use software control is available on an iPad or iPhone?

Click to expand...

Neal Van Berg here from Sound Science.
My Website is being rebuilt so please go to www.soundsciencecat.com eventually it will all be new but for now it is best just to go to my home page.

How much is the Qsonix software?

Perhaps Neal can explain why his server sounds different from others

Hi Steve,

I can only speak for what I do as I am not sure what my competitors are doing. I learned a very long time ago that solving problems that don't exist is a huge waste of time and effort.
I became a person with type one (then called juvenile onset) diabetes in 1964 at age 12. I lived in St. Louis and by the time I was ready for college I moved to Columbia Mo., a couple of hours away. When I became a type one I was told to keep my insulin refrigerated and I blindly obeyed never questioning this. By the age of 19 I would travel back and forth between Columbia Mo and St. Louis Mo., frequently enough that I decided rather than have insulin at friends and family homes refrigerated for when I needed it that I would design a small battery operated refrigerator, I could take with me.
By the time I was nearly 21 I had a battery operated refrigerator the size of a small lunch box that was perfect for 2 bottles of insulin.
I then contacted the American Diabetes Association to let them know of my fabulous invention, they said and I quote "Oh, you don't need to refrigerate your insulin, it will be fine at room temperature for 30 days"
That experience taught me to do better research and to only solve real problems.

The Music Vault series of servers don't solve problems that don't exist. They are silent with out going to extraordinary lengths in case design and heat sinking. I use fanless power supplies and fanless mother boards. I supply Raid One to auto duplicate your Music as a very real problem is that all hard drives fail the only question is when. I use slow energy efficient Hard Drives that are inherently quiet, keeping mechanical noise to a level you can't hear. I have also done careful testing with Music located remotely and accessed via my home network and the internet. In all cases the Music sounded great but there was a noticeable improvement playing the local music stored on the Music Vault versus the exact same music stored remotely.

I am very careful to not let windows change any of the bits, when windows gets hold of your music the degradation in sound quality is obvious.
there are other things I have learned to do which are my trade secrets that allow the Music Vault to output jitter free perfect bits.

Jitter really is the enemy of digital playback I provide a 6' cable with the Music Vault Diamond that is a true 110 ohm cable, a cable that is not the correct impedance will create reflections due to impedance miss matches and those reflections will interfere with the forward transmission and also create Jitter.

Neal

Does Music Vault work with a Mac

Hi Steve,

The Music Vaults are all headless units and work great with a MAC as your interface to control it.

Neal

Thanks Neal