Are you thinking Dirac Live has any similarities to BACCH Processing?
It does not. It is digital sound processing, but there are no other similarities.
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I donāt have such a thought, I shared it for information. This was the most relevant issue.
Relevant to what exactly? I must have missed something.
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I had some Bachh4mac issues creating DSP filters with Binaural mikes. I started getting cracks and skips audible when the speakers were playing the frequency sweeps and then trying to playback apple and Roon music. I checked biwire speaker connections first at amps and at Speakers and HF jumpers. Found they had loosened past 5 months. But did not not resolve issue. Checked all power cables some plugs starting to unseat did not resolve issue. Checked all digital cable connections snd reseated. Still no resolution. Checked for other mac mini apps open. Quit all but those needed for Bacch and Roon. Still no resolution
Started email to Edgar but decided to do a total Mac Mini reboot first. Finally everything worked without crackles. The Mac hadnāt been rebooted in several weeks. Apparently it removed the CPU processing conflicts that happened over time.
Just sharing so others can save steps in troubleshooting.
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@vkennedy61 Excuse my ignorance: if I want to test bacch4mac in the introductory version and I donāt use Roon. How do I connect to the MAC Mini and then to the DAC?
Currently I have the Aurender N200 connected by USB to the MKII and the SACD Transport by I2S.
Thanks for the help.
I think you should ask in this topic. Thereās several people there with the BACCH.
Have fun!
excellent, thanksā¦ as I saw that you commented something on the subject, I asked you! 
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@vkennedy61 recommended that I ask this question again here:
Excuse my ignorance: if I want to test bacch4mac in the introductory version and I donāt use Roon. How do I connect to the MAC Mini and then to the MKII ?
Currently I have the Aurender N200 connected by USB to the MKII and the SACD Transport by I2S.
Thanks for the help.
I suggest you contact Theoretica Applied Physics at info@theoretica.us. You need a USB interface to input the signal from the N200 into the MAC Mini. You could output the audio from the MAC Mini to the MKII via USB as before.
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Thanks for the answer, I already contacted them.
Iām exploring this myself. Unfortunately I know nothing about Mac Minis and have had help from @ganache. Iām not impressed with their diagram and assumed there would be a way of connecting my USB server (a Melco N1A - I use their iPad app called Melco HD to select music/playlists) directly to the Mac mini. It appears that they insist on using an RME device to get the music into the Mac mini. They suggest the use of an excellent device called a Babyface Pro FS (an excellent unit with a femto clock in it). They also suggest a powerful M2 mac mini. I think:
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any RME device that can take in the music from the source and route it into the Mac will do. I ought to be able to use a unit I already have called a Fireface UCX (I also have a chord MScaler thatāll take the USB from the Melco and convert it to optical or coax for input to the RME device and then output to the Mac). I believe others have used other RME devices, some of which are much cheaper than the babyface Pro FS - Theoretica will configure the RME device (RME devices use an app called TotalMix to route stuff within the Mac and Theoretica take advantage of that).
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not everyone uses the latest whizzo M2 - I believe some use M1s (Iāve not established the spec for things like neural memory and ethernet as I know nothing about Macs. Iāve a friend with an M1 but unfortunately heās way to busy to help at present.
My intention is to just try the Intro version. I think all that needs is the distance between the mid units and the distance to the speakers - no actual room measurements are required. I have the RME device and my friend can loan an M1, but I havenāt established whether his M1 will meet the requirements.
If one doesnāt own an RME device and canāt borrow a suitable mac then if one doesnāt want the software after the 14 day trial youāre left with kit thatās of no use to you.
Itād be interesting (to me) if people that donāt buy a Babyface Pro FS and a beefed up M2 actually list what they do use. Iāve not spoken to Theoretica but have exchanged a few emails. One email was never answered and another took them about ten days to respond to! If I tried the intro version and went ahead and bought a Mac then I could imagine also getting the microphone to better tailor the system to the room - I wouldnāt bother with head tracking.
@danofesherintheuk I took a look at the requirements, and Theoretica Applied merely recommends any Mac hardware from 2012 or later, which speaks volumes. Any Mac hardware pre-dating the M1 (before 2020) is so laughably slow in comparison that you really should only consider the M1 and not waste another second worrying about this.
The delta between the M1 and M2 is minuscule in comparison, since improvements are largely limited to the GPU, which doesnāt play a role in audio processing. The difference in CPU performance is even smaller and likely in the single digit percentages. Audio processing is relatively tame stuff, so itās absolutely implausible that such a small delta could even come close to making any difference; you would already be saturating your machine so heavily that any claim to that effect would be a huge red flag.
What I didnāt understand the need for was that the M2 that they sell has, over the base M2, an extra 8gb of neural memory and 10gb ethernet rather than 1gb - Iāve not asked them why but I wonder whether the users of M1s have things like extra neural memory (whatever that is).
Thatās just the base spec processor, with the only notable upgrade being 16 GB of RAM. Thereās nothing to read into the neural engine, since thatās just a subcomponent tailored to machine learning applications thatās also found on the M1 chip, and almost certainly not something that BACCH4Mac could take advantage of. If you looked at Appleās website, youād realize that this is just the standard description of their processor.
The unified memory architecture of Appleās silicon tends to go a lot farther than you might be used to, so what looks like 16 GB seems functionally closer to 32 GB in my experience. With 16 GB, I regularly have a Roon client open along with a browser with over 30 tabs, and Iāve never seen it use a single kilobyte of swap memory. If you donāt plan on using it heavily for browsing or other computer tasks, 8 GB is likely to be fine.
10 GbE ethernet is a head scratcher for me, since consumer class networking hardware doesnāt really do anything above 2.5 GbE, which is already rare in itself. Nevertheless, itās irrelevant for this application, since weāre talking about audio processing thatās done locally. It seems to me theyāre just selecting a mid-range model just for the sake of future-proofing, although I am frankly not seeing the need for it.
I made a mistake, itās an extra 8gb of Unified memory over base, not neural, so i wonder what the M1 users actually are using.
Hello, I was reading a lotā¦ and I had the same doubt.
What happens if I buy for example the Baby Face myself (I found it on EBay for USD 600), I start with the intro version and I like it. When going to the audiophile version, will I have to buy the whole pack again?
Luckily at the time of writing to Theoretica, they responded immediately. I hope the same thing happens with my last email.
Regarding the specifications of the Mac mini, they answered me this: any relatively recent Mac with 16 GB of RAM that can run Mac OS Montery or Ventura would do. Most of our recent customers have a dedicated Mac mini M1 or M2, which are very powerful and work nicely with BACCH4MAc.
You can upgrade to the Audiophile version without buying the RME Babyface USB. They will discount the price that they buy the Babyface interface for from RME.
excellent, thanks for the clarification.
I use Roon and my music streams into the M mini1 by ethernet. Since the mini communicates to babyface by USB. It seems plausible the Aurender could also then apply Bacch DSP filter and USB out to mk2. I know the system did not like converting USB to i2s through a DDC matrix. It sounds great but reclocking cause bacch4mac to hang on occasion. Removing matrix resolved that issue.
ok, which is still not clear to me what would be the correct connection path from:
Aurender: I go out via USB and connect to BabyFace. Then how do I go out to the Mac Mini?
finally I should connect via USB to the MKII to complete the whole circuit.