Thaddeus Smith

Watching with interest, though 2021 is already shaping up to be an interesting year for the homestead. So I'll stick with a firm "maybe" for now.

Welcome home bud. Glad you're still kicking around.

How much do you pay per qt? There's places online and even some local hippy dippy places that sell "farm to market buzzwordy" bone broth and stock for upwards of $20/qt. At those rates, I'm quite pleased to have the equipment and know how to make my own.

Not yet. I've got a bag of soup bones and a couple legs that need roasting. So maybe I'll make a few quarts over winter. The small number of butchers in my area are backed up big time, so we sold off all our younger stock this last week and back to a manageable herd size of just 6 for now. My focus for meat production has shifted towards the pigs and we may raise quail for meat in 2021. The turkeys this year were our best ever, so we'll certainly be doing those again. (yes, I know you were being snarky)

I'm a decent cook. Growing the food is where I've found my passion in the process. Soups and broths and other "lost arts" that draw out every last bit of nutrients from the animals are my favorite thing to make. Last month I made about 25 qts each of beef and chicken stock for the freezer.

He's not for eating. He's just for looking through.

Not sonically. You lose a reliable network connection and could possibly inject lag or disconnects during playback - it would manifest like a CD skipping in a portable player.

I would think that's the role of the dealer who sold them.

Oh no! Sorry to hear that.

Because why not.. I'm turning into a regular Dr. Dolittle.

There's some old threads out there on the topic. This one convinced me to just give it a shot with some cables I had on hand - and it worked. https://www.gearslutz.com/board/connectors-cables-stands-and-accessories/1246658-aes-spdif.html

I'd like to say I planned it that way, but it was a happy accident. To those that are curious.. going directly from coax spdif to aes is a whole lot easier than aes to spdif. So it turns out you can connect a digital device with coax spdif to the aes inputs of something like the Yamaha with little more than an RCA to XLR cable.

New music discovery and background music. For critical listening I flip over to my FLAC library, but for "radio" mode it's a far better solution to hearing a variety, finding new tunes, etc vs OTA radio. I've contemplated going from Spotify to Tidal, but my family plan costs less than a Tidal Hifi subscription and I don't want to deal with moving my wife over to the new service, etc.

I do believe it's the XL version which includes for the HQPlayer "NAA" protocol support. It's easy enough to try both. I also utilize the beta Spotify support, so it was a no brainer for me.

https://www.signalyst.com/consumer.html So it can be a super fiddly piece of software, but it has a cult following in some circles and has just a ton of filters and methods to choose from. I searched around the Roon forums for some "recipes" and plugged in options which aren't too far off from the defaults. When I planted a flag in digital XO and active speakers I also constrained my final DAC to 24/96. In my effort to reduce the amount of ADC to DAC to ADC to DAC handoffs, I've got my rpi connected directly to the Yamaha XO via AES, and I've got HQPlayer resampling everything in my library to 24/96 for the sake of compatibility. HQPlayer is a natively supported playback target in Roon. HQPlayer has it's own limited network playback protocol, which is natively supported by the RopieeeXL project on rpi. SO... Roon acts as the library manager and control interface from the couch (selection, volume, etc), sends the files to HQPlayer for resampling, and HQPlayer sends the resampled bits to my RopieeeXL rpi with a digital coax HAT that's directly connected to my Yamaha XO. The Yamaha handles DSP duties and then the single DAC process before the amps/speakers.

There's still room for PC's in the signal chain. Mine hosts the music, Roon server, and HQPlayer for resampling duties before sending on to the rpi actually connected to my stereo.

In spite of all that 2020 has thrown at us, we managed to harvest 6 of our turkeys today. Final weights were 4x 12lb, 18lb, and 19lb. Small batch, free ranged, free of antibiotics and growth hormones, etc etc etc. Had some people come help with the harvest and I was able to send them home with a turkey for their effort. It's a pretty cool experience and I always feel just that little bit extra connected to our fore fathers during this time of Thanksgiving by doing so.

Jimbo!!!

Good stuff - I do this to a certain degree with every one of my posts. I'll keep my eyes peeled for tidbits which need to be curated into this thread.

Darn tootin'.

Grow yer own.

Your best? Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and **** the prom queen.

Then stop worrying about settings and enjoy what you've got going. Sounds like you're squeezing out what you can with the gear you've got. The rest is just fiddling over inconsequential details. I'd be much more willing to dive deep with you in person where we can see and hear everything in together, but over a forum with information gaps and 11 days between replies? This is as good as it's going to get.

pick whatever sounds best to you. you seem hyperfocused on entirely the wrong things here.

Lost one of our silkie chickens to a predator today. Such is life. It flew off when I got close for pictures, but we'll let it keep the kill so it's not a total waste. They're a protected bird, so all I can do is keep the chickens up for a few days and hope it moves on for a bit.