Computer based Hifi

[Geek]

I use my computer not for main listening, but as my reference - I know what it sounds like and what music is supposed to sound like through it.

Drivers and sound card are everything. Once I heard this soundcard through the Linux ALSA system, the factory driver disk became a coffee coaster

My Classical collection is lossless, everything else in a V0 or 320CBR .mp3, or q9 .ogg.


Cheers!

[5th element]

Originally posted by Theo404



Got any more details on that? Have thought about doing this with my audigys a few times...


Cheers

The first thing you have to do is locate where the clocks are on the sound card. The M Audio makes this easy as the board isnt heavily populated. The DAC that handles the main left and right channel is also on it's own in one corner.

I then found the datasheet for the DAC and looked at which pins the clocks were sent to. After that I soldered some wires to carry the clocks off the sound card.

The DAC I built myself. TI provides lots of info in their datasheets that makes this a breeze.

[5th element]

Originally posted by wlowes
If you have not tried CPLAY, you must check it out.

You are in for a great surprise. A very generous fellow named CICS has developed not only a great player, but has experimented with PC hardware and software. Effectively, you dedicate a PC to become a music server. All extraneous bits of Windows are stripped away until only a few threads remain. Every step yields improvement. A dramatic improvement over Foobar and the like. Every release of CPLAY is a treat because its like you just traded in your $2k transport for a $5k model.

I've tried this and to be honest found it disappointing. cPlay is a nice player but is very annoying in that it can only open cue and wave files. This wouldn't be a problem for me, but the fact you cannot queue up several wave files at once just makes it a pain to use.

I tried CICS too and didn't find it to be any different from using windows as standard. This isn't surprising as you can get bit perfect play back when in windows anyway, the only other part is jitter, which I've measured as really low in windows as it is.

Maybe the benefit of CICS is different depending on what hardware you're using?

[KSTR]

I'm in the lucky position that there are excellent drivers for my Marian Marc88 semipro soundcards -- absolutely no issues with these, both under W2K and XP.

I like foobar pretty much just because of its no-frills but still sufficently functional frontend and its excellent capabilties. Alas under XP it seems to have problems when there is much traffic on the bus (from/to HDD), then I get crackling noises. Media Player Classic (not to be confused with the MS software) solved this problem, and it allows me to use DX/AX plugins, that is for cross-convolution in my case (the foobar convolver can do only simple convolution). Since this is a thing that I need, I can live with the drawbacks (especially lack of buffered read-ahead across track boundaries, which causes short drops/pauses in between tracks -- be it WAV's etc or direct CD reads). Not big an issue mostly as I have most CD's ripped into one single file -- and listen to them in one piece as well).

- Klaus

[5th element]

Originally posted by KSTR
Alas under XP it seems to have problems when there is much traffic on the bus (from/to HDD), then I get crackling noises.

Under preferences>advanced>playback, there's an option called 'Full file buffering up to' You can set this as large as you want. Mine is set to 100mb, which is large enough to hold almost any wave track. This way it loads the entire track into memory before playing it.

[KSTR]

Thanks,

I'v already tried that, it's not related to foobar itself (wrt preloading the files) it's a general problem whenever massive HDD access occurs for whatever reason. With any other software (including my DAW software, various editors etc) this problem doesn't seem to exist, it's only with foobar under XP (no prob under W2000).

I'm trying out cPlay atm as it gets rave reviews, but it won't play for reasons I haven't figure out yet (no error messages in the diag screen)... and unless I can use convolvers with it, it won't be ideal for me anway.

- Klaus

[ostripper]

By KSTR - it's a general problem whenever massive HDD access occurs for whatever reason

Try changing PCI slots for your soundcard. Look in device manager and make sure SC has it's own IRQ. (see below)
I can get get any of my sound cards to crackle if they share with the IDE/SATA busses.

I say this with confidence as I have 2 NICS reading and writing to 6 hardrives 24/7 (torrents and kids on network) while using the server as a HTPC/main listening machine (16 avi's simultaniously ) .. never a crackle.

USB controllers can share with sound cards on most newer MB's because they make use of the faster bus.
A sound card/videocard share is deadly in windows (BSOD) , that is why PCI-E sound cards suck. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...=PCI%20Express

If you read the "bad reviews" , it is all from gamers (3D graphics)
overloading the same bus that their fancy new sound card shares.
(crackle - pop)
OS

[Key]

The IRQ thing is great advice. Make sure you are not sharing IRQs with another device - sometimes this might require you to disable a usb port in the Device Manager.

But also sometimes it can be hardware driver related - a Network Interface Card can commonly hog a computers resources and cause DPC Latency to spike upr making your computer lose sync with the card. This seems to be a lot more common on Vista than XP.

[KSTR]

Thanks again, guys.

Soundcard has its own exclusive IRQ. The board is rather old, an ASUS P4G8X, known to have issues under high PCI bus traffic.

As I said, the problem is only with foobar+XP, also it does not depend on which driver type I select (MME/DS/ASIO). Anyways it is all interim, as a dedicated audio PC (bare-bone linux) is planned, for just the same things that Theo404 does (active XO etc). For the moment I can live perfectly with MediaPlayer Classic for the reasons mentioned that won't allow use of foobar.

- Klaus

[Jakobsson]

I have used several diffrent soundcards incl. most of the sb series and also Asus Xonar cards and so on.
My software player is Foobar together with KernelStreaming plugin which makes the sound go direct to the hardware instead of thru windows 48kbit upsampling.
Kernelstreaming is great!
Now i use onboard sound which everybody seem to hate but i think that the ALC889 onboard is a great chip.
For amplifier i use an old Denon PMa-980r that has optical bias ,another great thing that i like.
Partymusic player is Spotify a great player but with bad quality.

Use Gigabyte mainboards with alc889 if you want a proper onboard audio chip.

Pelle