It's been a steep learning curve over the last four months. After being gifted a Majik IL-230, a Genki and a shed load of Knekt parts at Christmas I've now finally got my head around what a Hi-Fi is, at least the basics. This post is partly to share my progress, pain & joy with the forum but also it helps get my journey, thoughts and plans down on paper and maybe show to others you can get some semi-Linn action on a very meagre budget. Also, it journals some of the effort involved getting these things working. You've got to remember when I started out I had no idea who Linn where. Let alone Naim, PMC, Spendor, Harbeth etc etc. My understanding of the heights of Hi-Fi prowess was running my mp3s through iTunes to a BoseDock!
So, after the initial excitement (Finally a real stereo!) I setup the Genki through the Majik into my Shure headphones and I was blown away by the CD player. Even after everything this is my favourite way to listen to music with what I have available. It's outstanding, immersive and never fatiguing but as always, there are so many things learn out there. CD's are doomed you hear them say, streaming is the future. Oh my, what a can of worms and I’m still not convinced. All those lucky lads with their LP12’s will get where I’m coming from.
My only saving grace at this point was not investing in iTunes as a source of music consumption. I always wanted the CD/LP, I'm old school like that. I want something physical for my cash. This is also why Tidal, Spotify etc will never work for me. This mindset saved me having to purchase everything again to get a FLAC library. Linn said it best, I wat to enjoy my music in perpetuity without the restrictions of third party services. I`m paraphrasing but you get the gist and I couldn`t agree more with the sentiment. I must have taken that from one of the many online Linn manuals I`ve read.
Rereading in detail about the modern trends in digital music I realised all my MP3 rips were dated and of poor quality, so I set about FLAC'ing my entire CD library. For those that care this is how I rip. There are many ways to skin a cat, but I like my results. Suggested improvements are always welcomed mind.
Windows 10
Standard CDROM supported by my ripper
Exact Audio Copy into Separate track FLACs but with CUE's extracted.
MusicBrainz Picard for MetaData Pass 1
Fanart.tv for the all-important hi-res artworks
Foobar2000 for final MetaData tweaking initial listening
Then after appreciating what a nice library looked like (in Foobar200 & Kodi at this stage) I considered my MP3s in iTunes and realised what a complete mess Apple had made of my MP3 collections MetaData since iTunes 4. I set about cleansing my MP3 collection with MusicBrainz and Fanart.tv. It took forever but I've finally got a 300GB library of sonic memories back to my teenage years. This if nothing else I'm glad I spent the time on.
In the mean time I was playing with minidlna uPnP server to get music from my NAS to a Bose dock my wife bought me. Again, I thought I had it nailed but I started not to like the Bose as a stream renderer. Playback was not gapless for a start, a MAJOR annoyance to me and something that should never be acceptable in this day and age. That sent me down the road of wondering what the big boys do in this space.
At this point I'd also been looking into getting some speakers as you can't spend your life in headphones right!? Linn speakers of course and I posted about it here but was introduced to Linn's DS range on a tangent. Well, that should do right what the BoseDock couldn't!? I couldn't afford one straight away, so I looked for cheaper alternatives and found the HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro. A great little device that acts a cheap £100 DS source. MoOde Audio is the OS of choice and it's great, bags of features, DSD playback being the most surprising (If not only another, and maybe pointless, rabbit hole to have dived down), full on upscaling, gapless playback, it even runs with Linn's Kazoo uPnP controller. Although I'm convinced direct NFS streaming is the way forward here uPnP is bloated and inconsistently implemented.
So, I'm back in the game right, library sorted, streaming audio into the Majik and headphones happy days! Let's get some speakers then? The bank account didn't agree but I was keener than ever to get the Majik singing. I assessed my financial priorities and made a mistake, not that great of one all in all. I purchased 2x4m of K40 and some nasty Wharfdale 220's in the Richer Sounds Easter Sale. At £99, they may not be great but at least at that prices more testing could be achieved. Well I'm glad I didn't spend too much because not only did they sound bad but there was a nasty distortion coming from them. Plenty of swearing, wanting to send stuff back and throw kit away but I finally concluded it was the Majik's power amp. To prove this, I ran the Majik into a Linn RoomAmp via the pre-out and bingo the distortion was gone. This simply means, the Majik is dead, long live the Wakonda!! I'll spare you the details of the Majik open heart surgery and motherbord swap... hehe
uPnP Severs, another minefield but I put this down to my own restriction of having my trusty old FreeBSD server for about 18 years now. The NAS market has moved on a bit since I wanted a server. I tried many, MediaTomb, Townky, minidlna, they all seemed a bit flakey, like everyone interpreted the standards in a different way. I like lean software and chose a couple of instances of minidlna. Everything was great, I even had it serving 4K movies to my TV so the handful of HD flac's and DSF files I had should never have been a problem, and they weren't. Thing is after sorting my MP3s out my library has grown a lot! The large lib killed minidlna off pretty darn quick. For about 2 hours it's been replaced with Serviio 1.9.1. So good so far!
I'm now running the following: -
Genki CD Player (fixed out)
Pekin Radio (because why not, she was free)
HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro in an RPi3 (variable out)
Majik IL-230 Pre-Amp & Headphone Amp into Shure 1540 headphones. Amazing sound!
Linn RoomAmp via Majik Pre-Out
Linn K40 Speaker Cables
Wharfdale Diamond 220
Linn Black RCA Cables
Network: Cisco SG300-20 Wired Managed Switch, ASUS Wireless AP and ADSL Router, Devolo HomePlugs
NAS: Home built FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE-p9 Servcing 12TBs of ZFS RAID6 volumes over NFS, Samaba 4.6.14 & Serviio 1.9.1 (uPnP Server)
So, the plan, Batman!
1) Swap the RoomAmp for an LK140
2) Swap the Wharfdales for Katans
3) Swap the HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro for a Sneaky DS
4) Run the HiFiBerry DAC+, RoomAmp and Warfdales in the Garage while fettling my motorcycles and dreaming of £50k to blow on a new Linn system!
I think life can get back to normal now, unless I wanna have a look at this eight-way Intersekt sat just over yonder? lol!!!
Final coupe of bits, if there are any other noobies with no cash out there that are nervous about dropping a thread on the forum full of chaps with money to burn, don`t be. PM me if you think you need anything I`ve been through here expanded upon. Also, thanks to SanAla71 for teaching me budget isn't everything & Ant_C for withstanding my daft questions about Kinekt.
Get your chops around the screen shot attached. I'm enjoying the music again, more than I ever did before.
Result.
https://www.last.fm/user/silkie_uk
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