A New Way...

[joesan]

Music vs Hifi

I love music. And I love Hifi. I have two Sony MultiCD changers that hold about 800 discs. These are controlled by my Mac and a program called Titletrack Jukebox. This enables me to immediately access any CD, build parametric playlists, play discs/tracks at random and discover hidden gems in my collection. When a CD is inserted into the CD changer a search is automatically made to the Gracenote database and the tracks and timings are automatically detected and loaded into the computer.

This is great for my love of Music. However it is not so good for my love of HiFi. The Sonys sound average to say the least. I reckon in 10 years time playing music on a CD will have the same position that vinyl does now i.e. it will have its aficianados who prefer the sound in some way but the rest of us will have moved on to a much easier and possibly, possibly better way of playing back our music - from our computer hard drives.

Because I like to stay ahead of the curve, and just because it will be fun I intend to gradually put all my music onto hard drive servers and build (or more precisely rebuild) my Mac specifically to replay music. I'll be funding this by selling off my conventional pieces of HiFi as they become redundant in the computerised setup. Note I want to build an audiophile system here not just a replacement for a desktop PC and speaker setup. It has to sound really, really good or there's no point in doing this.

I am ready for all the "computers have no place playing music" stuff but these days most music is processed in some way by computers before we hear it. After all if we didn't move on we'd still be pulling out the old wax cylinders.

I think that there is great potential for DIY here - building/tweaking the soundcard, taming the power supply and interference in the computer itself (this is surely a huge area since computers are inherently so damn noisy electrically, streaming to the DAC, not to mention the possibility of Hard Drive tweaking...


Proposed Setup

My setup will basically be a Mac G4 with high quality soundcard going to DAC (possibly via the Behringer DCX2496 for experimentation purposes). Then into the AudioDigit T amp (later will maybe go the UCD/Hypex route). CDs will be bit for bit copied to the Hard Drive using Lossless encoding and on a RAID array. The RAID array is basically 4 or so huge hard drives that are set up in such a way that if one goes down then you won't lose your entire music collection (which you've backed up on DVD anyway right?). Also please note that the CDs will be bit for bit copies not compressed in anyway i.e. not MP3 or AAC files.


First issue

What is going to be my most cost effective way of getting the Digit stream out of the Mac i.e. what soundcard to use? I am thinking I just need to get a digital signal out of the computer and feed this to an external DAC. There are some USB DACs out there that mean, I think, that no soundcard is necessary - the computer feeds the stream of bits via USB to the DAC and then on into the amplification. Has anyone had any experience with these USB DACs? Or should I just stream via soundcard to a normal external DAC? There might be noise benefits to the former. Also I am kind of thinking that there is no need to go for some all singing all dancing model with tons of processing ability since it is going to get fed into a external DAC anyway. Unless of course someone has the opposing view and maintains that it would be better to use a combined soundcard/DAC actually in the PC.

Any observations on any of the above. I just really want to brainstorm some ideas on this one.


[MODERATORS: Would it be a good idea to start a specific Computer Based Audio forum?]

[rfbrw]

some ideas.

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/searc...der=descending

[joesan]

Ha, Ha - you are so right rfbrw, nothing new under the sun, especially to our intrepid forum members.

It was just poetic licence to reinvigorate things and also to do something Mac-centric with audio-quality as the prime focus.

Having said that I will reread (or read) these search findings again.

[kevinkr]

You may find some useful information on the thread I started a few months ago - digital audio music server. It is pc/windows centric, but it should give you a pretty good idea of what would be involved for a mac. There are equivalents for a lot of the stuff I am using in Linux and I am thinking that if you are using osx you could run a lot of these apps.

Getting an uncorrupted data stream to my external dac was problematic due to the lack of general information and the prevalence of ac-97 codecs in the windows world. I am not sure this is an issue in the mac world at all.

My experience with usb codecs was not that great. Windows USB is plagued with latency issues with streaming media - again the mac is probably a lot better, but I would still recommend a pci based audio card. I am using the m-audio 2496 and I believe that this works well in the mac as well.

I am getting exceptionally good quality from this setup now, and as a rabid tube-o-holic am totally unapologetic about going this route. It sounds great! (Undoubtedly the best digital I have heard in my system.)

Good luck!

Kevin

[joesan]

Hi Kevin - thanks for your kind reply.

I'd already read all your thread, a couple of times in fact - its one of the best ones on here for me. Very interesting.

Its a shame that a lot of the applications are not truly cross platform. It would be a lot easier for us all to share some information. I still may use a PC, as a headless server solution and I could use VNC from the Mac to control it. EAC for example seems really good. However I do really love the OS X interface so much that it would be a shame not to use it, plus I can program it (a little!). Not to mention that it never crashes.

It seems to me that there are a plethora of professional or mastering type applications out there for OS X (a lot of musicians seem to use Macs) but virtually no OS X native audiophile type programs. Any Mac users out there - please point me in the right direction if you know of some.

What is helpful to me though is to hear your experiences with USB for example. To me USB was always bound to present some problems. Seems that the USB connection is the first thing to go whenever there is any kind of heavy loading on the system.

I think I am going to go the same route as you and use a PCI sound card. I am undecided on the soundcard at the moment - I am considering the EMUs, RMEs and the ESI Juli@. But a bit of me thinks why pay the extra for a good analogue output but instead go for a SPDIF output into a good external DAC. Did you try this at all Kevin?

One of the things that is really difficult in this area is getting good feedback about the relative merits of the soundcards and their sound quality. I am not sure but I think SPDIF is SPDIF and therefore I could go for a cheap card like the Chaintech AV710 and use the money saved on a good external DAC. I also plan on shielding it and working on a separate clean voltage supply.

Also having had a good chat with Vadim I am almost certain that I am going to go for a Behringer DEQ2496. Ideally I would have liked to do this as software in the PC but I think it would be too hard to find a decent application for this in OS X.

Anyway, Kevin, keep flying the computer based audio flag. I am sure everything is heading this way in the future. I've been surprised at the antipathy to using the Computer in this manner, almost antagonism. I mean its not as if a CD player is not a computer anyway, albeit a very specailized and electrically quiet one.

[kevinkr]

Hi Joesan,
A thoughtful reply to be sure... Yes I use spdif out to an external dac and I feel that this is in most instances the best way to go. The spdif signal feeds the dac connected to my hifi. Video sound is handled by the card's analog outputs and is fed to my home theater system. Interestingly I can stream both audio and video independently without problems, which is not as big a deal as it seems since both the hifi and the home theater system live in the same space, although electrically they are entirely separate.

I highly recommend the m-audio 2496, however the chaintek AV-710 is a good choice as well and does apparently support unresampled spdif output. You should avoid most AC-97 based cards except those that use the VIA ENVY 24 chipset or processing engine (licensed) as this is possibly the only AC-97 codec that allows you the option of not resampling everything to 48kHz.

Windows XP is pretty stable these days - I have 3 machines at home that run it plus the one I use in the office, and in 2 years I can honestly say that I can count the combined total number of crashes on all machines on the fingers of one hand. In most cases the crashes I have had were due to hardware problems which can affect any software platform.

I built the server from scratch and elected to go with XP because of my familiarity with it and the richness of applications in the audio/video serving sphere. I am sure linux would have been an excellent choice as well, but my limited familiarity with it prompted the "safe" choice in this instance. I just wanted something I knew would work from the get go..

Remote administration by VNC would work very well I believe. XP pro supports remote administration and operation natively and I thought about using my laptop to do that, however in the end I opted for direct control as the wireless connections from the 2nd floor WAP and router to the machines in the basement (laptop and server) is only about 70% reliable due to the distance and I thought this might prove frustrating. Direct wireless connections are possible, but a configuration nuisance.

Yeah I don't get the negativity about using pcs for media serving at all - with a little care the results are actually a lot better sonically speaking than with anything other than the most expensive cd players and transports. My server as a low jitter digital source definitely outclasses the other working players in the house by a wide margin and is at least as good as my now dead reference, a PS Audio Lambda Drive, which new cost about $2200.00 back in the mid 1990's.. Definitely worthwhile..




Kevin