John,For those who are interested in occasional CD play back or ripping to NAS / USB Flash drive on the MDAC2+ with Streamer I recommand a slot drive like this:-
http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-5...0001&campid=5338728743&icep_item=161778702969
Which can be plugged into one of the MDAC2+ USB ports and controlled via the Volumio UI.
Data is bit accurate & Clock-locked to the System audio clock.
A planned MDAC2 DAC board option with the fully discrete DAC disables the SPDIF inputs so such a USB drive allows a CD drive to be still used with these units.
This is very good news for me, so good I needed a day or two to absorb the implications! Up to now, I have been thinking of using my Oppo with the MDAC2, hoping that you would be able to clock-lock it at a later stage, but at least for CDs, this is now irrelevant.
I have been dithering on the streamer board, but this sells it to me very effectively, and if the CD control could also be done through the touch screen, even better. In any case, this gives me something that I wanted from the FDAC- a good CD player, now in a smaller space, and not needing yet another remote(the only downside I can see so far is that I will have to get some sort of grip on the Volumio interface, which I have been ignoring so far).
In the longer term, could it make sense to clock-lock the Oppo for use with SACD? I would use the HDMI output with an audio de-embedder, but would the jitter from HDMI defeat this? At the moment, without clock-locking, there is little difference between the SACD and CD tracks; both are inferior to the rips on my Mac Mini (via Regens, and the Detox will probably increase this difference).
A minor point about the Apple drive you suggested. Its from Malaysia- are you sure this is not Chinese in origin?
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