I recently bought an old Mac Mini. Mid 2010 with 8GB of ram. Installed an SSD and updated to High Sierra. Installed Audirvana 3.5 and connected it to my DAC via USB. Costs me about 200,- Euros and a few hours to set it up. To be honest Upgrading to High Sierra and replacing the SSD took most of the time. After I set it all up I installed the Remote app on am iphone and connected to Tidal and Qobuz. Since then I let it run 24h and it just works. Sound is awesome, it’s silent as can be and is pretty decent on electricity. 20w from the wall when the screen is off.
If you already own a mac and and iphone and don’t like to fiddle this is for you. If mine broke today I would go out and buy a new second hand one tomorrow.
If you are a die hard DSD guy you might wanne go with a pc… idk but for pcm streaming this is a great solution that is pretty affordable. From my experience those units wont die on you after just a few years.
Hi there, sorry to re-awaken this sleeping thread, but would love to know if you did anything special to your 2009 mac mini to use it efficiently as a streamplayer ? I have an old late 2009 sleeping in a cupboard and would like to see if it can be put to good use, knowing that i’d be nearly exclusively using it to stream qobuz In hi-res, but still would like to have the ability to play lossless files from my Nas.
I think if your 2009 Mini has 8GB RAM you’re good to go. Mine has and it’s worked flawlessly for several years. TBH I can’t remember a problem when it only had 4 GB. I have it connected to a decent USB DAC and removed all possible software that wasn’t music related.
I’m still using my 2009, with El Capitan and 4 GB ram. No reason why you couldn’t employ the one you have. Mine mostly streams Tidal, and sometimes local files from an external HDD.
I do nothing special, although years ago there were some tricks to get it to boot the 64 bit kernel in earlier versions of OSX. Not required with El Capitan.
I’m planning on buying a second-hand 2009 mac mini to stream qobuz with audirvana remote for ios, a topping dac and integrated amp.
I still have a few questions: basically, do you leave the mac mini ready and running all the time with audirvana ready to play; or do you leave it to sleep and wake it up only when you need to play music? This would mean that you need to unlock all the time or have a mouse plugged and ready all the time?
My late 2012 is set to never sleep. Open in the morning, close at night. No screen attached, so no screen saver too. Music on portable usb3 external hard drive. From screen sharing from my other mac or with remote on iphone, Audirvana is always responding
I know Audirvana will run on El Capitan or newer, which means mac mini A1283 with at least 2go RAM or newer. As recommanded by audirvana, 4go ram is best (but 2go possible), so I’m only looking for 4go minimum ;).
I even found one 2009 with 5go ram and ssd updated.
Regarding power supply, is the A1347 model better for this application?
Don’t know about power supply. 2gb might be possible playing local file at 16/44… streaming is another thing, don’t think about upsampling for sure. Streaming use more ressources i guess… i bought an iMac 2020, not M1… comes with 8gb… didn’t think too long to bought at the same time 32gb on Amazon = 40gb… minimum is for minimum ressources… SSD is good i changed mine too… 5gb ok, but like 2gb for the OS… so, 3gb for Audirvana, might work, maybe others with older mac will come to answer.
Mine is late 2012, i5, 2.5ghz, 16gb, ssd… i don’t stream, i dont upsample…
i don’t have bugs, playing bitperfect from my local files.
don’t know how much you will pay, neither where your from, but buy one later from Canada…
money is cheap here if you from EURO or US
like for 300 bucks canadian money, you can have this one with 16gb of ram, 2 hard drive (1 ssd)
Yup, I’m another that keeps the Mini running 24/7. It has for the most part since new in 2009. Shut it off for a couple vacations over the years, and for the odd thunderstorm.
It’s headless, so I used screen sharing when I had a MacBook, and these days with a Chromebook I use Splashtop for remote access.
Cool, thanks for the comment
I was wondering, is there any benefit to have the late 2012 mac mini with USB 3.0 instead of mac mini 2009 and its USB 2.0, as I plan to plug the dac by USB (and stream up to 24/192).
Thanks
The older mac mini models are known to have a higher noise floor on the usb outputs. You won’t notice that with regular cans but with high sensetive IEMs you will notice that.
Just found this forum… I have been using Audirvana for three years and a MAC mini since 2010 feeding a CARY Exciter DAC through a toslink.
Is there better option for signal transfer? I have always assumed (yea bad) there is no usb output for music data.
I’ve always been happy with what I hear from the Shihinian Arc’s powered by a Blue Circle NSCS but if improvements can be made simply by switching signal inputs I’m certainly game.
