Popcorn Hour C-200 as a Transport ?

[paul_peraic]

Would any knowledgeable people out there know if it would be possible to mod a Popcorn Hour C-200 to be a worthy competitor to a cMP hardwared PC setup as a transport ?

It seem all the effort that the cMP set up has gone to has been done in the Popcorn Hour C-200 just maybe throwing a Linear PSU at it and separately powering the hard drive a bit of re-clocking recapping some grounding work and hey presto a machine that might be similar to the PS Audio Wave transport or is their some sort of black art in that machine ?

And if not why the guys at Pacific Audio are doing such things with the Netgear EVA 9150 as a solid state drive and mucking about with the buffering and codecs of that machine , it has a chip similar to the Popcorn Hour C-200's Sigma SMP8643 667Mhz which supposedly does stream loss less Wav and Flac files at 16 - 24 bit 44.1 - 192 KHZ , but there seem's to be pro's and con's for these type of players could some of you guns help explain why or why not this will work ?

Is this not just a stripped down simplified PC that should theoretically sound better because it does not have all the extra noisy junk running and polluting the sound as a fully fledged PC has or is it because a PC has ASIO and a dedicated sound card that it might sound better and a popcorn hour can not actually stream loss less files as a PC can ?

For those of you who have not seen it or heard of it here is a quick You tube link on it YouTube - Popcorn Hour C-200 HD Media Player Video Review and some specs Welcome To Popcorn Hour

If this is not possible it seems to be a smoking media player ?

[paul_peraic]

It can't be that bad can it ?

[DeepBass909]

I've got a Popcorn Hour C-200 and as far as I know, it doesn't resample any audio, but offers pure pass-thru for digital media. But to use it as a pure transport maybe a bit to much.

A quick look at the info-page reveals nothing special to be honest... They tell a big story about the basic benefits of digital media, but this goes for every digital storage device... The only real difference I can find is that the PS Audio can extract digital audio by it self. The PCH needs a pc for grabbing. But with the correct software, you can get bit-perfect grabs from about every media.

I personally can't hear any difference between a flac played from my PCH and the original CD played on my Cambridge Audio Azur 540D dvd-player. In both cases, the source is connected by an optical S/PDIF cable and decoding is done by my Cambridge Audio Azur 540R receiver.

[paul_peraic]

Hello DeepBass909

So you think it has no potential as a transport even with a few mods ?

I have compared it against my Sony CDP-337ESD and Cambridge Audio CD3 on digital coaxial out and it was a noticeable difference the cd transports lacked weight and resolution detail and imagery compared to my C200 .

I did find it a lot harder to notice the difference in transports with my Yamaha RXV-2600 receiver , though it was easily noticed when played through my Marantz 170DC power amp and Wolfson DAC .

It also seems Audiocom have caught on to modifying the Popcorn Hour C200
and have mentioned decent benefits in doing - discrete regulators , capacitors and clock mods to the Popcorn Hour . (It would be nice to see under the bonnet of one of these Audiocomm C200's) C200 here is a link to the web page-

Audiocom International


I have recently replaced the capacitors on the C200 board and also placed an external sata drive with separate power supply and it seems to have more detail in presentation and bass weight .

The switch mode power supply is located separately to one side and seems quite easy to upgrade with better components and maybe discrete regulators will fit , as it is meant to be a low power consumer maybe a linear power supply is possible once I placed my hard drive externally there seems to be a lot of room for one.

To me this seems a cheap and worthy possible successor to a semi high end cd transport with the convenience of having an entire cd library on a hard drive ?

[SoNic_real_one]

Since Popcorn C-200 has a Sigma chip: I have a WDTV Live and I found out that it down-samples everything that it is over 48 kHz sample rate. WD support blamed Sigma SDK for this - so that is a minus.
A plus is that the HDCD signal is undisturbed - I have connected the WDTV live to my Denon AVR3805 and it still decodes properly the HDCD encoded FLAC files.

[paul_peraic]

Hello SoNic_real_one

On the NMT (popcorn Hour) forum I have been told from beta testers and product designers that the Popcorn Hour C200 does not down sample even though they use the same Sigma chip .