MINI ADVENTURE

The Mac Mini computer is an agreeable little companion; it's almost silent and takes up little space. And that has made it popular as a music source. Factor in the iTunes connection and you have a great way to buy music and play it. But computers are full of interference, produce jitter and can't play top quality digital, or so it's said — but rarely proven, so we tested one.

Here's a look at the latest Mini from Macintosh, released this summer running the Lion OS-X operating system, version 10.7.2 in our case, put under the spotlight of our Rohde & Schwarz digital signal analyser.

Height has dropped from 50mm to 30mm, mainly because the latest Mini has no CD/DVD drive. That means £25 or so must be added to its £599 basic price for an external drive, if you want to rip music from your CDs. We connected up an LG BE12LU30 Blue Ray burner, it was seen by the Mini and iTunes copied CDs/tracks from it with no hitch. iTunes in its latest version will still burn to CD, even though the Mini has no CD drive. Lack of a CD drive is irritating for music use but for the time being at least not an insurmountable problem. An external drive does of course spoil the Mini's small footprint: suddenly the cables and boxes of computer mess appear unless the drive is brought in only when needed.


The good news is our analyser showed that rate conversion either up from 44.1 to 48, an awkward non-multiple, or down from a 48k rate to 44.1k produced no serious jitter issues, unlike earlier models. In fact, jitter was very low by everyday audio standards our analysis below shows, so the latest Mini is fine as a music server in this respect, contrary to common speculation. Noise behind a high resolution 24bit test signal was incredibly low at-145dB so noise is not an issue either. The figure with 16bit is inevitably higher due to quantisation artefacts, measuring -92dB, but there was a flat noise floor with no computer generated electrical mush.

The Mini still has no uPnP server onboard so it will not be seen by audio devices like A/V receivers or Network players (e.g.Cambridge Audio NP30), over an ethernet or Wi-Fi network.

We talk about installing a uPnP server and the optical S/PDIF alternative in the January 2012 issue of the magazine. Recording from CD is also explained. This article is a brief summary.

CONCLUSION

So under tests, the latest Mac Mini confirms its popularity as a great little domestic music server. It's inexpensive, unobtrusive in a way few other computers can match and able to store and deliver your CDs and downloads to the hi-fi. There are now no serious issues from computer problems people fear: noise and jitter and clock rate conversion.

See the January 2012 issue of Hi-Fi World, available at the start of December 2011, for the full article explaining how to use the new Mini as a great home computer, able to act as a music server too. 

JITTER

With a 1kHz, -60dB signal the Mini produced just 15pS of signal related jitter, a value lower than most CD players.

NOISE

Running a -60dB, 1kHz tone at 24bit resolution, notched out in this analysis, band noise measured -144dBFS - extremely low. Residual electrical noise is not evident.