Taking the PC to hifi...

Well, Paul has done the hifi pc thing before, so I thought I'd go for a slightly different spin on it.

Having recently acquired the superDAC, and got it up to speed (with a few more mods to come), I thought I'd take advantage of it for PC use as well as on the end of a CD transport (on which front I should make a move this week.... got a plan ). However, my rather aged SB Live, apart from being a piece of ...., has no external digital out, and although it is possible to hack an spdif electrical off the board, I really couldn't be bothered. So, I've gone for something of a bargain...

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2764246755&category=3701&rd=1

This allows me to use optical connection (leaving the coax and AES/EBU for transport and DVD (future)), which has the advantage of not carrying the (significant) RF junk from the computer straight into the DAC. Plus the terratec cards (like paul's EWX) are a significant step up from the creatives (of which I've had enough). I didn't feel the need for the EWX since the superDAC does what the EWX offers over the Aureon, and didn't need the DMX 6Fire as gaming isn't an enormous priority for me.

Plus, I paid for the Aureon and the SuperDAC combined around the new price of the EWX, although the mods to the superDAC have added to the price...

Still, I think a good upgrade at not too much money.

 

Not a bad price for a not bad card there. I think that should make a decent transport for the DAC as it does not AFAIK resample the output, so should be a nice clean signal. As you know, I believe PC based hifi has a lot of potential (1,000 CDs on a hard drive, almost CD quality broadband radio stations etc etc).

 

Well done Isaac, had been watching that myself but forgot about it at the crucial time!

After I got my superdac I started looking for a replacement for my decrepit sony cd player.
However, I have had a long standing urge to set my PC up as an audio server which I am now looking into a bit more carefully.

The plan at the moment is to have the pc tucked out the way in the corner of my room, connected into my superdac, probably by an optical link.
I will be able to do all configuration and uploading of cd's through my network and VNC, so no need for a monitor, keyboard, mouse, or anything really.

I plan to use Winamp for playback, controlled with RemoteAmp. This will allow me to select songs and albums to play remotely using an Ipaq. I know this bit works 'cos I have tried it.

Things still to sort out are:
1. Get my proposed audio server to be completely quiet. I have an old pentium 200 which is completely silent (fanless CPU and PSU) but I don't know if this will be capable of sending out a decent output and running winamp etc. Working on making an Athlon 900 silent using passive water cooling which will definitely be man enough.

2. Decide on an output method. Do I use a cheap PCI card such as the Trust 514DX (£30), a USB optical output (have one already), or something like the M-Audio Audiophile 24-96 (£130)? Using the M-audio means that I can upsample everything with software on my computer and give the dac a 92khz signal. Either way I must make sure the hardware doesn't do any silly resampling a la Creative.

3. Get a big hard disk and start ripping. Going to use EAC and perhaps Monkey Audio Compression. Reckon on nearly filling a 180Gb drive with .wav files to start with (about 120Gb if compressed).

So really the only dilemma I have at the moment is do I get a high quality sound card to give my dac a decent feed, or do I use some cheapy thing and then purchase a seperate upsampler / jitter reducer?

Anyone been able to stick a PC feed in to an upsampler to see what difference it makes?

 

Phill- I'll let you know how the Aureon works out with the superDAC. Have you modded the superDAC at all?

 

No mods yet, I wanted it to bed in a bit first so I could hear any improvements.
New PSU and RCA mods will be first (using an old IC with jacks soldered on the end at the mo). Think I'll just work my way down Tone's list after that.
What have you done to yours?

 

I am fairly sure Foobar 2000 can be configured for remote control usage, and if it can, you would be well advised to use this over Winamp, simply a better player with better sound quality.

I'd recommend using Musepack quality 6 or 7 over Monkeys Audio. OK, its a lossy format, but I think its highly improbable you'll hear any difference whatsoever, being as it is a state of the art codec with > 99% transparency with > 99% of audiophiles even on expensive equipment.

Instead of you being able to fit 150 - 200 CDs on a drive, you'll be able to fit 1,000. Before you write off Musepack, then I would suggest double blind testing using Foobar to see if you *really* can tell the difference between Monkeys Audio and Musepack. Even if you can (very unlikely), the difference will be so tiny that its most likely not even going to be an issue in any case.

 

I've RCA modded and built a new psu for mine. Schottkys and caps and op amps are the next stage.

 

good deal mate.

now you can get rid of the not so good SB Live card.

 

Hello everyone,

Just thought I would let you know that Apple have released a PC version of I-Tunes which sounds a little better than winamp on my PC and has better Jukebox facilities without needing all of the extras.

And its free!!!

Andrew

 

hmm i might try this out.

 

See this thread

Michael.

 

Alternatively, if you want an unbloated, fast player that sounds great and supports more formats than i-tunes can dream of, try Foobar 2000. I was disappointed to learn that i-tunes supports hardly any formats.

 

It supports MP3, AAC and WAV - what more does anyone want? Frankly, who cares if it doesn't support the latest bleeding edge format that some spotty teenager in Arkansas finished developing yesterday and which totally blows everything else out of the water but is just as insignificant as the 263 other formats like it that came before it and the thousands that will come after it

i-Tunes is superb. It does what it says on the tin, extremely well, no more, no less and that's what a great product is about. Something that Apple seem to know a lot about

Michael.

 

I haven't compared any software yet, but how can one program sound any better than another if both are playing back the same wav file?
I can understand it making a difference with compressed formats, but not uncompressed ones.

I want to find the best way to get the signal out of my computer first, hence why I want to stick with wavs to begin with.

I'll perhaps start messing about with compressed files later.

 

OUCH!!

Well I happen to have encoded my entire collection in Musepack format, which hasnt just been finished yesterday (but has been around for quite a while) and if you care to delve into the world of compressed audio, you'll find that it is in fact, not as insignificant as you make out. I wouldnt be surprised if more people used that than AAC. I have no AAC tracks, so I couldnt give a monkeys about that.

The fact is, I would have tried I-Tunes if they'd supported a few decent formats, like OGG, MPC, AC3, FLAC and Monkeys Audio. Of course, all the developers should give up on all of these codecs, because according to you, nobody really cares. In fact, why did Apple bother supporting AAC in that case, since nobody gave a shit about that before i-tunes and i-pod came on the scene.

In the case of Windows machines, there are gains to be had by using software that can bypass the kmixer.sys file, which is the file which has the windows volume controls and tone controls and such, and on many machines is known to tamper with the original file, WAV or not. Kernel Streaming and ASIO are the way to go.

However, the differences are pretty small, but since its a free improvement, no matter how small, why not use it?

 

Seriously though Paul, what the hell is Monkeys Format, I think that about sums it up.

itunes supports the big players, the ones that 98% of the world users of compressed music will be interested in. It would be blout ware if it had to support this minorities which are used by computer enthusiasts.

As mentioned before though, itunes will make a lot of sense to those with an ipod, but then the ipod was designed to be used with itunes, its a great compliment which allows me to keep track and update the ipd with absolutly nothing more than plugging it into the dock.

I am totally uniterested in music compression formats as they are all fundementally flawed any way, if you are going to lose 90% of the data you are going to lose 90% of the music, there is no getting away from it.