nVidia ION, Asus Xonar as active XO, DAC and source

[trd1587]

Originally Posted by Studio Au

@trd1587, did you use usb flash drives as your boot disk? in raid aswell, any good?
I did a little research into those SATA compact flash adapters, they don't seem very fast, most are slower than 2.5" 7200rpm drives but i could load on windows 7 or xp perhaps a lite version and stream all my music from the NAS. No moving parts and fairly cheap.

For my first rig I...:
Well What I did is..... I took a piece of ¾" plywood (beceifer) and screwed a motherboard to it (socket A) having beforehand put a sonopan board piece under. I Used a 160Gig PATA drive that was pretty big at that time.
Closed the box with white cedar , all walls coverred with sonopan. Made a heat canal in the box so that the air entering the casing passes throught the cpu heatsink then close to the HD then out via the power supply. PS was equiped with 5" low noise fan. CPU ran hot so I had to underclock it to 1.4 Ghz.

I started to plan my second rig but my second baby cut hobby time alot so parts are there lying waiting to be tested..
3ware 9550SXU-4LP CARD (up to 4 drives)
2 x Intel X25-E SATA SSD HD
ATI HD card (4xxxHD)
Creative X-FI Xtreme AUDIO
1X SATA 320 GIG 7200 RPM
CPU AND Mainboard not yet bought
CPU will be corei5 or i7 low power on a fat heatpipes sink with no fan, like most tubes in a tube amp, will be out of the box.
<


I would love to test SSD HD in real hardware Raid 0 and compare to raid 0 5400 notebooks HD. (very quiet) but SSD HD becoming cheap for a true silent setup would be my choice taking in consideration the performance bottleneck of such devices.

Please tell us what you decide and how it turns out.

Regards
Marc

[mikaljones21]

There is a PC based Xover program that should work on your system. The latency is near zero and does not use very many resources from the PC. I think your system would do it. The link is on this page.

There are a bunch of other help pages related to what you are talking about as well. I forget the name of the program but I know it is on that site somewhere.

[Studio Au]

Does anyone know if you can setup active crossovers completely automatically with a pc (spdiff input) and a mic, kinda like the way the behringher DEQ8000 auto calibrates the eq speakers to give a flat response?

Would be really nice to plug in speakers and have software optimise everything for the best, most accurate sound.

[mikaljones21]

Not that I know of.... I don't think it would work because tastes vary so much. You should use a measurement program get it as flat as possible with that and then tweak it to your tastes. It doesn't take very long to do. Couple hours maybe.

The nice thing is you will make changes and then listen to it the next time and notice something else that needs adjusting. That happened to me several times over the course of months until I got it just the way I liked it. Keep adjusting until the music sounds real to you. Just make sure you have some other sources as a reference like real music.

[Studio Au]

It would be great to draw up a list of software or combinations that would allow this to function fully. I wish it to operate as a standalone unit, one source simply digital. Although it can handle two digital inputs, which in future may be utilised.

Although linux may has some benefits i can't the way in which it operates and simply cannot use it, so windows and mac software only.

I hear good things about Foobar.
The link a few posts above recommends Thuneau Transient Perfect loudspeaker DSP tools . Windows DSP speaker crossovers.
Any other recommendations?

[mikaljones21]

Originally Posted by Studio Au

It would be great to draw up a list of software or combinations that would allow this to function fully. I wish it to operate as a standalone unit, one source simply digital. Although it can handle two digital inputs, which in future may be utilised.

Although linux may has some benefits i can't the way in which it operates and simply cannot use it, so windows and mac software only.

I hear good things about Foobar.
The link a few posts above recommends Thuneau Transient Perfect loudspeaker DSP tools . Windows DSP speaker crossovers.
Any other recommendations?

The behringer 96/24 crossover unit does some automated sweeps. (I think) But it still is not fully automated. From what I've heard though it is really easy to use. Might be what you are looking for. But it's not PC.

[Studio Au]

thanks Mikal, I have one already, but it is used in my main setup, it is great and easy.

For an entirely separate setup I don't however want to buy another £250rrp 24/96(£120 i paid for B-Stock), and a £200+ DAC and source, computer, airport express etc, not to mention the cables and space.

If I can accomplish £600+ hardware of different boxes, power supplies, plugs mess cables etc for a one box unit (itx pc and amp) for under £200. I will be happy.

[Studio Au]

(I have a few old computers lying around, and although not completely silent would do, also have some eBay Class T amps, and an old Sony 5.1 receiver)

So a completely new DAC active XO Source etc can be accomplished for the price of a Asus Xonar, or £85.

£85 vs £600. I should stop posting and buy it and see!

[mikaljones21]

Sounds like you are well on your way. Just need an ASIO sondcard to play with. They are all over the place on price.

I use a firewire device -the Maudio 410. It sounds good but has some reliability problems. Locks my PC up sometimes. It's a known driver issue with the device so I'm now looking at the ECHO 12 12 firewire.

Let me know how your project goes.

[demogorgon]

what you need to keep in mind when wanting to utilize an atom based system is not all movies (read pirate) will be decodable by hardware. dont know what sort of collection you'v got but consider yourself warned. used to have an opteron 140, 1.8 single core that would barely pull 720p, and the atom is slower.