Nest Theater Part Nineteen ~ New JRiver MC Streamer ~ MeLE 2Q2 27Apr22

To eliminate my complete frustration with Win 10 maintenance on the Dell XPS13 laptop, that serves solely as a JRiver client for digital files, and to eliminate fan noise, I added a fanless NetTop to run Linux and host JRiver MC. It's got bluetooth for integration with remote controls, WiFi to connect to the net when needed (but already my music library is stored locally in Silverthore on an external 2TB SSD, to eliminate latency), and spits bits true to 96KHz. The tiny box is a MeLE Celeron 2GHz Quad-core 8GB/128GB fanless box for $220. This was all new stuff to build & integrate, other than fly rods, to engage the melon.

First I built, to Matt's disgust, a Ubuntu 20.4 OS on the Mele. I went back rev as it'd been verified to run JRiver MC28 well. Then I built JRiver MC28 for this environment; all good - it loaded my 1TB of FLAC/MP3/DSF/WAV tunes quickly into the library. On first "play" attempt on the NestT - nada. I needed to reset the driver for digital audio output, in the OS and MC28, properly. Among the 50 drivers available I found iec958 ALSA to be the better bit-perfect one for this OS. It rendered music well and at high bit rates. Discussing this choice later with Matt I modified my selection to YY, with no apparent change in character or playback. 

The new MC28 digital player setup rocks the doors off and is better controlled with a new Logitech K400 keyboard.

On this digital side I again used Dirac Live and my tiny miniDSP box to correct for the current config, the room, and the speakers. I made a number of painful measurements but I can't say enough about this system.

Here's a sweep comparison of Dirac vs No Dirac on the NestT. Yeah, I don't know why the Dirac EQ over-corrected in the 50Hz-100Hz range... I need to work on that.