Hi there. I am in my trial month with Audioirvana Studio and I am very happy with it. At the moment I have Audioirvana on a Mac Book Air MacOS Sierra 10.13.6 (2017) and I control it via Ipad. Unfortunately the Mac Book Air is also the computer I am using for all my other purposes, so I was thinking of buying a second-hand Mac Mini to keep next to the Denafrips Terminator dac and use it only as a sort of “streamer”. At the same time I wouldn’t like to spend too much money on the Mac Mini, so the question is: which cheapest Mac Mini “model” has the minimum requirements to run properly Audioirvana? Any suggestions, better if based on personal experience? Thanks. Maurizio
The most important question is “What is your budget?..” The newest MacMini M4 16GB base model is a very powerfully qualified platform for Audirvāna and is relatively inexpensive… It is generally not the best idea to build a platform around the ‘minimum requirements’… More System RAM and memory bandwidth throughput/speed, is better. 
The Apple Comparison tool:
Thanks. Yes I see your point but you have also sent me the “minimum” and “recommended” requirements, and I noticed that the M1 is the “recommended” one. What are your thoughts about that? Thanks.
Any Mac Mini with an Apple M CPU, since those will have the longest updates of MacOS. Older ones with an Intel CPU will probably get out of the update cycle of MacOS soon.
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You must look beyond the present and look to the future of digital-audio playback and system design… Buy the most powerful Apple platform that you can afford… At some near-term point, Intel Macs are going to be obsoleted as far as macOS support from Apple Inc…
I replaced my 2016 i7, 16GB MacBook Pro with a Mac Studio M2 Max, with 64GB of RAM… I perceive a positive audible difference and performance difference favoring the Mac Studio, running macOS 15.3.1… I run HRTF DSP via the Audirvāna plug-in architecture and up-sample (modulate) all PCM files to DSD128 (1-bit 5.8MHz) for output to my DAC via the r8Brain algorithm.
Hi @Samoggia, it sound like you are considering a Mac mini as a “dedicated Audirvana” machine. If yes, the base M4 Mac mini ($599) provides plenty of ‘runway’ in the sense of years of support from Apple. If you have a large music library, pair it with an external SSD.
If you are considering a Mac mini as a working machine, you certainly want at least 32GB of RAM to ensure a long runway.
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