phoenixdogfan

Yeah, Chris, you are absolutely right that surveillance capitalism is a very creepy thing. Just the other day my Alexa, out of the blue, told me it noticed that I had two items in my Amazon shopping cart that had been there for three days and asked if it could complete the order for me by receiving my verbal assented right then and there. Yeah, real, real creepy. And the other thing that gets me is this stuff is our life data, and it's being strip mined from us and sold for the profit of the strip miners without giving the original owner so much as one red cent. Think about it. Mark Zuckerberg is worth upwards of $50 Billion because he took yours and my private and personal data (which we may unwittingly half-consented to supply or not) and sold it to marketeers, potential employers, credit bureaus, insurance companies, law enforcement agencies, and, for all we know, Russian intelligence, so those parties could manipulate us with ads; discriminate against us in employment, credit, and health insurance decisions; track us down for legal infractions; and propagandize us around election time with special ads narrowly tailored to hit our hottest buttons. These data mining activities are anything but harmless. Very often having a large set of seeming innocuous and unrelated factoids like whether we listen to ABBA at 8am is enough for the collectors of that data to form a very complete picture of who we are and to use it for their own purposes which may or may not be in our own best interests. The European Union has recognized the problem and responded with some stringent privacy regulation. Good luck on ever seeing that happen here.

Don't agree. Most recent Macs support both HDR and Dolby Vision. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102205

Certainly not the DAC. More likely the powered speakers are volume constrained by their limiter. Look to add a sub and a good DSP like Dirac to see a gigantic boost in sound quality. Also consider a crosstalk canelllation software like UBacch. Dirac DSP, a sub like and SVS SB 1000, and UBacch will create something that should surpass the Harbeths and your tube amplificcation chain.

All I really want to know is whether they are still streaming MQA. If not, then I'm fine with their labels. But I want to know if I'm getting MQA when i set my player for the highest tier, AND if I'm still getting MQA when I drop to the HiFi setting. Does anyone know the answer to that one? Because I'm just fine with CD quality, but not MQA. ;

Useful article. Unfortunately, can't use the M1 with JRiver to decode Atmos for online streaming movies from Netflix or Amazon Prime which would be my prime desired use case. I have no desire to create such as system for Atmos music offerings. But we seem to be getting closer. the Motu Ao, as I understand it will accept 24 channel USB LPCM and output analog of up to 48(?) channels via Phoenix connectors, so it could be used along with a Mac M1 Mini as the control center of an Atmos system. Would Dirac Live work in such a system? Have a feeling it would since the plugin processor seems to offer that many channels. At the point where you have codec decoding and a suitable mulltichannel DAC with all the channels on the same clock, you could use whatever amps and speakers you want. I, for example, have four LS 50s, 2 SB2000s. and the center and 5 satellite Kef HTS 3010 SE which I could use for center and height channels. Since I already have the 5.1 system set up, I would just need to find poles for the Kef heights and and suitable amps (hello Aiyima A07!) and I could have a 5.2.4 Kef based Atmos system for the price of 4 poles, a coupla Aiyma A07, a Mac M1 Mini, and a Motu Ao. But obviously, the missing link here is the capability of decoding Atmos codecs (excepting Apple) withing either an Apple or Windows box.

I am also very interested in the digital side of things. I am finishing up most of my audio purchases for the year (the final one will be an SVS SB 2000 to give me two for my small listening room), and I now want to turn my attention to the computer hub or server for the entire system. I'm not actually planning to play Atmos or anything other than the legacy codecs unless some kind of breakthrough is achieved and the licensors of said codecs allow them to be decoded from streaming apps on my PC and made available as LPCM streams for internal room and speaker correction, PEQ, software based crossovers etc, because that's what I do on my current Windows set up: I take audio streams from desktop Qobuz, Netflix, run them into JRiver via its WDM driver where I do some PEQ, Dirac corrections, high/low pass and bass management for the subs, and channel routing to output the 5.1 LPCM stream via usb to my Octo DAC 8. I'm looking to do the exact same things with a more capable new PC which will also be able to render HDR 10 bit color video to my LG Olded while performing the exact same audio functions and doing it with a silent PC. Ultimately I think I would like to do this on an M1 Mac Mini but I'm unsure how much of my software will run on MacOs and whether there exist acceptable substitutes for anything I use that a Mac will not run. I know the Mac will run Netflix and output 5.1 DD+ audio, likewise Qobuz and Tidal, as well as Kodi, so all the streaming services appear covered. Likewise it will run JRiver and Dirac, but not, I think, EAPO, or either of my two software based crossovers --Ekio and Dephonica. So, basically, I need I need to know what very basic PEQ and software based crossover programs are available to run on a MAC OS, and I am not interested, btw, in something like Roon which would be overkill for what I'm trying to do. Can anyone suggest something that might work? I basically want high low pass for subs and PEQ, and I kind of want it to work seamlessly with JRiver.

To quote the Smyth Research site: "The best and easiest solution ... is to personalise the playback of the sounds through the headphones so that they recreate how our own ears hear each sound. We do this by measuring how sound propagates from an external source to each ear, and use this to create digital filters that mimic the normal analogue filtering action of each ear. During this measurement process we also determine the distance apart of the ears, and measure the acoustic impact (or reverberation) of the environment on what we hear. The overall result is a personalised room impulse response (PRIR) that contains all the information needed to accurately recreate how an individual hears an external sound through their own ears. In combination with low-latency head-tracking personalisation ensures that the listener cannot tell whether the sounds through the headphones are real or virtual." So a PRIR (a Personalized Room Impulse Response) measures how the transfer function of the room and your own anatomy (head shape and size, external ear, etc) alters a given digital signal before it comes to your ear canal as sound waves. It then applies that measured transfer function to the output of your headphones to duplicate what you personally would have heard from speakers playing in the room where you were listening to them.

Or in your case, your home, given what's already in your listening room.

Or buy a Smyth A16 Realizer and get an in person PRIR done in a studio by someone who know what they're doing.

Is there a reason it has to be the Shield Pro? The only differences between the Pro and Shield TV are the Pro's USB input and larger internal memory. If DD+ Atmos streaming is coming from the internal Tidal App, and Atmos True HD files are coming from the NAS, there wouldn't necessarily be a need for the usb attached storage (unless you preferred an attached USB drive to NAS), or am I missing something?

Another question if we're decoding Atmos over a PC is whether either Windows or Apple M1's render Dolby Vision Video. Alternatively, does either machine accept HDMI-eARC? If not, are we stuck with HDR10 at best if we want our PC's to do immersive audio and video?

And while JRiver is at it, how about the capability of decoding ATMOS DD+ streams from Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Vudu, et all. I would not at all mind paying for this as an add-on to defray any licensing fees it may cost JRiver. I don't want a freaking Atmos AV receiver, I just want to receive an atmos stream on my Windows box and send it to my multi channel DACS after using JRiver to run bass management, PEQ, and multichannel Dirac live. I already have the DACS and the speakers, just need something with a "brain" to tell them what to do.

So am I understanding this correctly? From a Mac Mini a video stream could run like this: ATV+/Netflix===>M1 Sierra Nevada OS Video Renderer ===> HDMI Dolby Vision Video stream====>Dolby Vision Video capable 4k monitor (Lg C1) Audio stream : ATV+/Netflix====>Sierra Nevada OS Audio Decoder===>16 Channel DD+ Dolby Atmos Audio====>Audio DSP Management Program (JRiver for PEQ, Bass Management, High Low Pass for sub and mains, 16 Channel Dirac Live)====>Digital Routing Software (Black Hole or Voicemeter Banana) Directing 8 LPCM channels to one DAC & 8 LPCM channels to different DAC====2 USB outlets===>2 USB LPCM streams (8 channels ea) to each respective DAC Is this set up possible and does the Apple OS provide for a decoded Atmos multichannel LPCM stream that can then be manipulated with DSP and routed via USB to external dacs, or is this piece of software unavailable currently?

I've been researching this, but don't know. Does the Mac Mini support both HDR 10 and Dolby Vision via its HDMI and or Thunderbolt ports? Can't seem to find much. All the reviewers want to do is wax enthusiastically about how well it does video editing.

When you consider reconditioned Mac Mini M1's with 8/256 are going for around $525, I would to cry too much. Based on what I finding out, just a stupid good value.