QB-9 Roller Coaster

[Glisse]

Jeff,

From iTunes main menu:

• Preferences>General>When you insert a CD: Import Settings>
• From here, choose either Apple Lossless or AIFF. With Apple Lossless, the setting is Automatic. With AIFF you can use Automatic, or force it to 44.100kHz, 16 bit, Stereo - which is Redbook (CD) standard.
• It is important you also have checked the tick box for "Use error correction when reading Audio CDs". This can have a big impact on quality.

With Apple Lossless, iTunes will show (if you have selected Bit Rate and Kind in the headings) the compressed bit rate, not the uncompressed rate. So for a Redbook file, the Apple Lossless bit rate will be somewhere between 800-900 kbps.

As you are still ripping files to your iMac's internal hard disk, keep using Apple Lossless. Later on, you can easily convert these to AIFF if you decide to use an external disk where space is not an issue, or want to use another device which cannot play back Apple Lossless files (many cannot).

For ripping and file conversions, I use a program called Max, which is a free (donation accepted!) download. I would not bother about this for now while you get your feet on the ground. Just keep using iTunes, but you can find Max here:
Max from sbooth.org

The settings on the QB-9 are not critical, so your ears are working fine! You have no music with a true sample rate above 44.1kHz on your iMac. When you are sending a 88.2kHz stream, Apple's Core Audio program is upsampling the output to the DAC. Whether a DAC prefers an upsampled signal, or a bit perfect digital stream at the native rate, depends on the DAC. The QB-9 is internally re-sampling anyway.

Sometimes it is better for the computer to do the upsampling, sometimes it is better for the DAC. And sometimes it is better for no upsampling at all, with NOS DACs, which the QB-9 is not. Just try these things for yourself.

The upsampler in Core Audio is not regarded as particularly good, so until you start having any high resolution downloads in your music library, there does not seem any point to use 88.2kHz rather than 44.1kHz. It is just making your processor work a bit harder for no obvious benefit.

Once you get Audirvana or Pure Music, you will have much more control on upsampling, and they use different upsamplers (at least Audirvana Plus does), so you could try this again. But really, these differences are very small. As I said earlier, Pure Music can be a bit daunting to set up, so I would recommend you start with Audirvana first, and see whether you hear any difference to iTunes.

The Mac Mini is of course tiny, and takes up very little room. You just need to hook it up to a display (a TV via HDMI is fine) to first set it up. And then, as I said, you use Finder on your iMac to locate it on your network, then select Screen Share. Then a window opens on your iMac which is the screen from the Mac Mini. Within this screen, your iMac is now acting as the control device for the Mini - mouse cursor, keyboard, etc. It works really well. So it should be considered as a remote extension of your iMac, rather than a separate computer, LOL! If you do get one, just remember to get 8GB RAM - you can add this yourself, it is much cheaper than buying it from Apple with 8GB.

Good luck

[rbbert]

You may also want to download XLD, a multi-function utility which will rip CD's using Accurate Rip as well as providing rapid interconversion between all formats (WAV, AIFF, FLAC, ALAC, mp3 and mp4, etc)