Anybody else using a PC as a transport ?

[Kaliar]

Hi SteveInNC,

Modern TOSlink has done away with most of the complaints that audiophiles had when it was introduced.

So true ! I needed a 5m connection between the RME Digi96/8 and the Benchmark DAC1. I decided to use a TOSlink glass cable because of its immunity to electrical interference and also because the RME Digi96/8 PAD is reputed to have an excellent optical transceiver.

So far, I'm very happy with my choice.

Regards.

 

[sleepysurf]

GREAT info on this thread. I didn't know about the new SlimDevices Squeezebox 2 which natively supports FLAC. Coupled with a 300 gig Buffalo Network Server, or even a Terrabyte Server (http://www.buffalotech.com/products/storage.php) it's a very cost effective solution. Only thing missing is Album Art display, but I'm sure the next-gen devices will include that.

 

[Kaliar]

sleepysurf,

I found today an alternative to Windows Media Player that could be of interest to you: Meedio - Media Center PC.

Many formats are decoded, including APE and OGG. Unfortunately, FLAC doesn't seem to be available...

But "Meedio Essentials can even display the cover artwork for your albums."

Please take a look here: http://www.meedio.com/whatismeedio/essentials/

Enjoy!

 

[sleepysurf]

Thanks. And apparently the latest version DOES support FLAC!!

 

[Kaliar]

sleepysurf,

Thanks. And apparently the latest version DOES support FLAC!!

You're welcome ! And if Meedio supports FLAC, that's good news !

Regards.

 

[JonFo]

High Quality PC Audio

Using a PC as a transport is something whose time has come.

First, have a great source in terms of the raw bits, so pay careful attention to how you rip, then encode our CD's.
To rip accurately, use a high-quality CD-ROM, I personally recommend the Plextors (with C2 error detection support). Use Exact Audio Copy (EAC) to peform the rip.
This will give you the most accurate bits from your CD.

Once you have good bits, you can then do whatever on the PC. I store the rips as .WAV’s, no compression. With today’s HD sizes, this is not the big deal it was a few years ago. I also process the CD down to high bit rate VBR MP3’s for my portable systems. So I usually wind up with about 800MB used for each CD for both the WAV’s and MP3’s.

Playback of those bits is just as critical, so start with two things, a great player and good hardware.
On the player side, FooBar2000 is the king. It is bit accurate, and has more high-quality plug-ins than you can dream of using.
My favorite is the resampler, which I use to give a 16/88.2 output to feed my Meridian 568.
To get a sense of other devices, I use the Convolver plug-in and various impulse models that simulate the response characteristics of other devices. There are tons of models for cool studio devices, including several tube processors. It’s kind of fun to show a ‘tube-head’ buddy of mine how I can simulate his ‘sound’ by just adding a file to the Convoler plug-in on my PC. Makes his head spin ;-)

Oh, and a cool plug-in for Foobar is vis_bacon, which let’s you run Winamp visualizations such as my favorite: Milkdrop.

To get the bits out of the PC, you need to skip the crappy sound cards (including Audigy based ones), go for an M-Audio Audiophile or one of the RME cards. You want something that will NOT resample 44K to 48K internally. You also want to use ASIO or kernel streaming interfaces.

I personally use only digital feeds from the PC to the audio system. This eliminates any concerns about PC induced noise. The M-Audio’s have very low Jitter, not that I worry too much with a Meridian the re-clocks and buffers incoming streams.

So how does it sound? Awesome, never heard a CD player that could touch this.
When you see the effort it takes to rip some older CD’s (30 to 45 minutes for some due to error management), you realize that no CD player can deal with those issues in real-time, they just try and mask it as best they can. A well-ripped WAV file can be played back with greater precision than any CD player ever can.
Add in the upsampling and the smoothness and clarity are just incredible.
The Martin-Logans really help reveal the nuances of the various playback streams.

Highly recommended.

Systems:
Home Control PC (running Meedio Housebot for automation, FooBar2K for audio) with M-audio delta 24/96 card, Toslink to Meridian.

Home theater PC (running Meedio front-end and FooBar2K) with M-Audio Audiophile card via coax to Meridian.

Audio / Video server with 2.8 terabytes of RAID5 storage on Gigabit and 100MB LAN

Four TurtleBeach AudioTron’s spread around the house for background music playback fro the A/V server. Other PC’s and Mac’s also go to server for A/V playback.

 

[Kaliar]

Hi JonFo,

Thanks for sharing your setup !

To rip accurately, use a high-quality CD-ROM, I personally recommend the Plextors (with C2 error detection support). Use Exact Audio Copy (EAC) to peform the rip. This will give you the most accurate bits from your CD.

I can vouch for the quality of the Plextors since that's what I use !

On the ripping software side, I also used EAC but since I have Plextor drives, I prefer to use Plextools, which also produce bit-perfect files.

Playback of those bits is just as critical, so start with two things, a great player and good hardware. On the player side, FooBar2000 is the king. It is bit accurate, and has more high-quality plug-ins than you can dream of using.

So true! It might not be as user-friendly as the alternatives but it works beautifully.

To get the bits out of the PC, you need to skip the crappy sound cards (including Audigy based ones), go for an M-Audio Audiophile or one of the RME cards. You want something that will NOT resample 44K to 48K internally. You also want to use ASIO or kernel streaming interfaces.

Lynx cards, like the L22, are also very good choices.

When you see the effort it takes to rip some older CD’s (30 to 45 minutes for some due to error management), you realize that no CD player can deal with those issues in real-time, they just try and mask it as best they can. A well-ripped WAV file can be played back with greater precision than any CD player ever can.

Yes, and that is what many people do not realize about using the PC as a transport. They assume that a PC has to be inferior because they compare a 20$ CD-ROM drive to a real CD transport or player. The comparison has to be made elsewhere to be valid: a bit-perfect WAV or lossless audio file played with Foobar2K using the ASIO plugin is a tough match for any CD transport reading in real time !

What can and will make an audible difference is the hardware, mainly the audio card's circuitry and DAC, as well as the quality of its connectors and that of the cabling linking it to the music system. That's why one has to choose wisely its audio card: an ordinary one will make you regret your CD player while a great one will make you a believer !

Thanks again, JonFo, for your input!

Regards.

 

[sakhavi]

(sorry for the long post...)

At the moment the files are stored in bit-perfect format on your hard disk drive, the most difficult task of any CD player has been done !

One note about this: bits on a hard drive don't stay in one place after they've been stored once. Your OS moves them around as it sees fit. Moreover, a physical hard drive head has to locate and read the material that is stored. When the head then tries to deliver those bits at whatever sampling frequency you specify, there's a possibility it will drop some, particularly if they are scattered throughout your hard drive. Use of a RAID, like Mr. Hogan mentions, should eliminate this possibility; short of that, a good drive defrag program (such as SpeedDisk) will do the trick too.

I'm contemplating a similar system to SugarMedia's, running a music server on my desktop iMac with a dedicated external drive for media storage, then AirTunes. My aim is to take our laptop anywhere in the house, pick a playlist on it and hear music where I am.

In my current thinking, though, this won't interface with my main music system. Basically, I expect the times when I want the flexibility afforded by this kind of system to coincide with the times I won't need (or can't reasonably attain) hifi. In my living room with guests whose voices I want to hear, on my back porch watching my kid play, or in my car, it's great to have tons of music at my fingertips but I'm not 100% concentrated on it. Getting to retreat to my listening room is then all the more special (it's sort of a Zen thing, I guess - "When you listen, listen. When you entertain, entertain").

Therefore I'm not worrying much about compression or audio equipment through the house - MP3s and powered bookshelf speakers will probably suit me fine.

I do wish iTunes let one add a bit more custom metadata - I have lists and lists of songs with great guitar solos, songs about food, songs that correlate in other user-defined ways, and I'd love to be able to simply filter based on such metadata and auto-build a playlist on the fly (say for a joint cooking exercise with friends). Because of this I'm also considering home-brewing a MySQL / PHP music server; I have a copy of Mac OS Panther for Unix Geeks for just this purpose but haven't motivated to start yet...

 

[mattables]

I have been using a computer with my system since the beginning, and I love it. It is wonderful having access to so much music, however, computer noise, and the occasional bits of feedback, can be frustrating. My computer is my old Canopus video editor; the dual 2800 processors and 600GB of storage might be a bit overkill for a jukebox, but it is all I have.

System #34

Matt

 

[Kaliar]

Hi Sasha,

One note about this: bits on a hard drive don't stay in one place after they've been stored once. Your OS moves them around as it sees fit. Moreover, a physical hard drive head has to locate and read the material that is stored. When the head then tries to deliver those bits at whatever sampling frequency you specify, there's a possibility it will drop some, particularly if they are scattered throughout your hard drive. Use of a RAID, like Mr. Hogan mentions, should eliminate this possibility; short of that, a good drive defrag program (such as SpeedDisk) will do the trick too.

Yes, it's always good practice to defrag regularly. In order to help minimize the problem of fragmentation, I store my music files away from the boot drive, on a separate hard disk.

It is also useful to have a minimum amount of active processes on the music server. That's why I almost never encounter dropouts !

Regards,

 

[JonFo]

Hi Sasha,


Yes, it's always good practice to defrag regularly. In order to help minimize the problem of fragmentation, I store my music files away from the boot drive, on a separate hard disk.

It is also useful to have a minimum amount of active processes on the music server. That's why I almost never encounter dropouts !

While good disc management practices are encouraged, the biggest contributor to smooth playback is to have the right level of buffering in the playback software. In FB2K, go to Preferences->Playback and set the buffer level to 24K or greater. I play back most of my audio from my server and never encounter drop-outs, even when copying other things to that server or seeing other traffic on the net in the house.

 

[Kaliar]

Hi JonFo,

While good disc management practices are encouraged, the biggest contributor to smooth playback is to have the right level of buffering in the playback software. In FB2K, go to Preferences->Playback and set the buffer level to 24K or greater. I play back most of my audio from my server and never encounter drop-outs, even when copying other things to that server or seeing other traffic on the net in the house.

Good advice ! Thanks for sharing !

 

[summitgnp]

Another member who uses a PC

I have been using a PC setup for playback for a couple of years now. My library consists of approximately 3000 CDs in FLAC (approximately 1.3 TBs). These drives are stored in a seperate server (for noise control) outside of my listening room. My playback PC accesses the files over an ethernet network an outputs via USB to an Edirol UA-1000 external soundcard. The UA-1000 converts USB to SPDIF. The signal then goes to my TacT S2150 for volume control/signal amplification. From there out to my ML Ascents and Decent. PC is used for library management, along with digital room correction (DRC) which replaced my TacT RCS 2.0. Playback software is Winamp. I certainly have no interest in turning back to CD based playback.

 

[SugarMedia]

I have to admit, I was hoping some Audio Godfather would come on this thread and say, "it's wrong, it's all wrong to listen to music this way." This is what I was at least expecting, but haven;t seen any comments like that...

However, what about HIFI rule #1...Less is more, the more components you put between the source and the speaker, the more the sound will differ. Looking at many of your suggestion you add about 4 transport steps.

Any thoughts??

 

[Kaliar]

I have been using a PC setup for playback for a couple of years now. My library consists of approximately 3000 CDs in FLAC (approximately 1.3 TBs). These drives are stored in a seperate server (for noise control) outside of my listening room. My playback PC accesses the files over an ethernet network an outputs via USB to an Edirol UA-1000 external soundcard. The UA-1000 converts USB to SPDIF. The signal then goes to my TacT S2150 for volume control/signal amplification. From there out to my ML Ascents and Decent. PC is used for library management, along with digital room correction (DRC) which replaced my TacT RCS 2.0. Playback software is Winamp. I certainly have no interest in turning back to CD based playback.

Wow, that's awesome, summitgnp ! I am humbled by your setup (mmmm, TacT !)

Thanks for sharing !

 

[sleepysurf]

FYI... Slimdevices (www.slimdevices.com) is now shipping their new Squeezebox2 streaming music player. They claim significant "audiophile" focused improvements, and "tweaking" capability, see... http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_faq.html#about2-audio

I, for one, am impressed, and have placed an order. Only caveat is that it takes a MAJOR hack to bypass the PC and run directly off a Buffalo Linkstation (as music server). The daunting steps are outlined here... http://fieldnetworks.com/slim/linkstation.html

 

[Kaliar]

However, what about HIFI rule #1...Less is more, the more components you put between the source and the speaker, the more the sound will differ. Looking at many of your suggestion you add about 4 transport steps.

Any thoughts??

Not necessarily so! If you wish, you can simply replace your CD player by a PC audio card and use analog cables as before (that is if the audio card has a good analog output and the proper connectors). If you already use a CD transport connected to an external DAC, you just use the digital output of the audio card instead.

So, in its simplest form, you can still follow HIFI rule #1 !

Regards,

 

[Kaliar]

FYI... Slimdevices (www.slimdevices.com) is now shipping their new Squeezebox2 streaming music player. They claim significant "audiophile" focused improvements, and "tweaking" capability, see... http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_faq.html#about2-audio

I, for one, am impressed, and have placed an order. Only caveat is that it takes a MAJOR hack to bypass the PC and run directly off a Buffalo Linkstation (as music server). The daunting steps are outlined here... http://fieldnetworks.com/slim/linkstation.html

Thanks for the interesting links, sleepysurf, and please keep us posted about your experience !

Enjoy,

 

[m2bozz]

Hello,

I am using xbox media center with the xbox high definition pack and then running the audio over fiber to a Denon 4800 receiver. From the receiver I than go to a Carver ZR1600 Amp. Which justs makes my Aerius's sing. Here are some screen shots of xbmc. It includes IMDB search, it will find cd covers of cds that you rip to the hard drive. It will also show videos basically any video codec. It also does DTS and it will even show you the weather forcast, internet radio, and so much more.

Here are some screenshots.

http://xbmc.sourceforge.net/imgs/xbmc_alpha/xbmc_alpha_screenshot_mayhem07.jpg

http://www.xboxmediacenter.de/info_screens.htm

 

[ASLayerAODsk]

my Aerius i's and my Audigy 2 ZS

well..do a google search for my nick 'ASLayerAODsk' and im sure under one of the postings youll see my system specs...ive been doing it for years now...using my PC with my ML's now...ive ownd them for about 2 i think now...and now having the 2nd gen panels....they have improved in high end freq's i think....i use a GSnake 1/8 - RCA/Coax cable...and my ML's sing unbelievably, in analogue. and a Monster Coax for the digital..and it sounds beautiful..however...my gf has now discovered B&W's Nautilus Signature 804's actually...so yikes....but i had the original 804's against the Aerius i's when i was contemplating the 2...and these won out....as i now own them but i ALWAYS use either 320 mp3s or FLAC/OGG....nothing less....the ML's just plain and simply show too much of the compression of the lesser mp3s or crappy rips from cds...I find the sound quality from my Audigy 2 ZS is satisfactory..but i KNOW it can be better...as ive tried the KX drivers and just waiting for them to support my ZS more completely...so then ill be improving my sound even MORESO once they do...so being patient in this case....will hopefully pay off

edit : K i went out and found the link that shows my specs..as well as a rant...

http://www.tweaktown.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18182&page=3&pp=10