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Before we find out, what does Kevin personally use? "Synology NAS boxes. They are all hard-drive based but being remotely located silent in terms of impact on the listening environment. What I really like is the reliability the RAID array offers (I run a 4 x 2TB drive array).  It makes me feel a lot better about all the music I have stored. Let's face it, any single drive is going to eventually fail. It's not if but when. I keep a spare new drive sitting around for each NAS. If one goes down I can just swap it in and off I go. I have seen drives fail (the newer higher capacity ones seem less robust). If it wasn't for the redundancy of RAID, I could have lost over 4TB of music. That is one hell of a lot of things to have to try and recover. I also have a smaller 2 x 2TB RAID drive in another location. That backs up the changed files every evening. With it in a physically different location I feel pretty bullet proof, knock on wood. The Synology boxes are about the best I have used and not priced bad either!"


Gremlins. Setting PureMusic 1.74a and shortly afterwards version 1.8 to 88.2kHz or 96kHz in either hybrid memory or straight-from-disk mode, I suffered micro glitches usually 2 to 5 seconds in length. Their garbled high-speed nature suggested momentary data overrun. Audio mostly returned after such incidents but occasionally muted altogether. The same happened with iTunes pure. Back in California meanwhile Kevin "had no luck replicating this behavior on either a dual-core MacMini or 13" MacBook Pro with fully current versions of OSX and PureMusic 1.74a. I tried every up/down sample combination possible." 


Gremlins vanished. While I then learnt that a similar issue—albeit exclusive to 88.2kHz—had been documented for the original Streamer II on Rob Robinson's PureMusic website, HRT had subsequently adjusted feedback to offset improper payload delivery of USB data packages by what then was the most current OSX version. This had been fixed with a flash chip revision to the Streamer II. To Kevin my present 96kHz incident suggested a bandwidth issue. Armed with the specs and serial number of mine he managed to procure an equivalent year 2010 21" iMac from eBay. He performed a clean OSX install and could not duplicate my issue. He next sent me a Belkin powered USB hub. Running it powered eliminated my problem. He next asked me to run it unpowered. That would still offload a task from the iMac's root hub he explained. Even unpowered I could play through multiple albums front to back without a single incident.
I found this a bit baffling. If a signal detour through an unpowered hub worked fine—so my techno peasant brain reasoned—eliminating this detour should too. I thus took the USB hub out again. Lo and behold, immaculate 88.2/96kHz. As far as I could remember, I had not installed any OSX updates since I'd begun listening to the Streamer II+. I can't be 100% certain however. I don't track computer events in a log and iTunes routinely changes. Fishing for a solid explanation why or how things fixed themselves, I'd be far happier if I could point at something. No dice. Or snake eyes.


Kevin's suspicion shortly into this remote trouble shooting was that I needed a clean OSX install. He was certain that due to various USB/Firewire driver and similar installs in the past, my operating system had corrupted. I was very reluctant. A complete hard disk wipe is a last resort. Thankfully the mysterious 'reset' eliminated it. Kevin then sent me an Iomega hard drive loaded with the most current OSX installed clean to check whether his suspicion about my operating system proved out. I accessed my iTunes library remotely through the Iomega to bypass my own OS.


I noticed no audible changes nor any other behavioral changes for that matter. Regardless, kudos to Kevin Halverson for going so many extra miles in this process of strategic elimination to ascertain that his component was blameless. That was impressively professional conduct of the first order!


In passing I did learn that unlike Simon Lee's April Music U3, Kevin's USB-powered device did not work if I simultaneously imported a CD (which I didn't test deliberately but simply saw happen upon returning from Istanbul with a stack of 50 new CDs that greedily awaiting ripping*). None of my wall-powered converters ever or now noted this extra load. The HRT meanwhile cut out immediately and refused to 'relaunch' whilst the iMac was ripping a disc in its slot. Perhaps this was once again peculiar to my computer? Or perhaps such an operation doesn't deliver sufficient voltage to the USB port to support the Streamer II+?
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* Some of my favorites from this bunch are embedded on this page: Birsen Tezer "Cihan" [Kalan]; Zafer Erdaş "Buram Buram Anadolu" [Hammer Müzik]; Ertan Tekin "Demans" [Kalan]; Tanini Trio "Dokunuşlar" [KAF]; Selçuk Balci "Patika" [Kalan]; Jacques Loussier Trio, Güher & Süher Pekinel "Take Bach" [Apex]; Makis Ablianitis "Bahar" [Libra Music]; Tarkovsky Quartet "François Couturier" [ECM].
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