Hi,
I just thought I'd share my experiences with building a Tripath system for my home PC.
I have a pair of tangband W3-871S and used John 'Zaph' Kutke's monitor design, which sits either side of my LCD screen. These drivers run almost full range, I have an active filter -12db/oct below 100hz. For a subwoofer I use a peerless 8" woofer in a 12" x 15" x 17" enclosure downfiring, and it too has an active filter matched to the W3-871S high pass and that uses the linkwitz transform to force the driver to deliver down to 35hz in this small enclosure. All the active filters use OPA2134 op amps and metallized polyester caps when needed in the signal path.
For the amplifier I have 2 tripath amps, 41hz "amp1" kits. The first one drives the monitor speakers @ 30w per channel and the second one runs in bridge mode for the subwoofer @ 150w (linkwitz transform requires a lot of power).
Anyway, onto the topic. Recently I have been playing around with different soundcards with this setup to see how the soundcard affects the sound quality. I have ripped 500 of my CDs into lossless format and use foobar as the player using ASIO. The three soundcards I tried were:
1) Audigy 2 ZS (using 2 x upsampling to stop the Audigy 44.1Khz to 48Khz resampling). This was my default soundcard for a couple of years and although it sounded OK initially, in comparison to the other sound cards it has weak bass and has a recessed sound.
2) M-Audio Delta 410. I'll be using this card for a whole of home audio setup. It has significantly better bass than the Audigy 2 ZS and slightly better soundstage and resolution.
3) M-Audio Revolution 7.1. This is the card in my home theatre PC and it produces a sound similar to the 410 but with a more forward sound and a slightly improved the soundstage
4) EMU 0404. This card has been getting rave reviews over at head-fi.org for headphone listening, and as its relatively cheap I thought I'd buy it to give it a try. I wasn't expecting much difference from the M-Audio cards but was pleasantly surprised that the bass was firmer and fuller, and the amount of detail in the sound increased. I also took the opportunity to remove the on board caps and output buffer, which added to the soundstage and surprisingly improved the "speed" (attack) response of the system and produced a clear, smooth treble response.
I'm now very happy with this setup, which gives a huge soundstage, high resolution, solid bass and the ability to resolve individual instruments in a complex passage (Tripath is famous for this). It is also very forgiving of poorer recordings, which is different to my main (and more expensive) setup which shows every flaw in a recording. So this little system has finally hit the
synergy of all its components, something I've found very hard to find when building / setting up a hifi system. Now to stop fiddling with it an enjoy the music
If you are looking for a soundcard for a PC based system, I'd recommend looking into the EMU 0404 & modding it, it certainly bests the M-Audio cards at least for this setup.
Next project for this setup is to add microprocessor control for mute & volume through a USB connection to the PC and writing a small amplifier management application on the PC to mute the amp when the PC shuts down & adjust the volume in software using a LM1972 volume chip. (did I say something before about stopping fiddling
)
Regards,
Dean
I just thought I'd share my experiences with building a Tripath system for my home PC.
I have a pair of tangband W3-871S and used John 'Zaph' Kutke's monitor design, which sits either side of my LCD screen. These drivers run almost full range, I have an active filter -12db/oct below 100hz. For a subwoofer I use a peerless 8" woofer in a 12" x 15" x 17" enclosure downfiring, and it too has an active filter matched to the W3-871S high pass and that uses the linkwitz transform to force the driver to deliver down to 35hz in this small enclosure. All the active filters use OPA2134 op amps and metallized polyester caps when needed in the signal path.
For the amplifier I have 2 tripath amps, 41hz "amp1" kits. The first one drives the monitor speakers @ 30w per channel and the second one runs in bridge mode for the subwoofer @ 150w (linkwitz transform requires a lot of power).
Anyway, onto the topic. Recently I have been playing around with different soundcards with this setup to see how the soundcard affects the sound quality. I have ripped 500 of my CDs into lossless format and use foobar as the player using ASIO. The three soundcards I tried were:
1) Audigy 2 ZS (using 2 x upsampling to stop the Audigy 44.1Khz to 48Khz resampling). This was my default soundcard for a couple of years and although it sounded OK initially, in comparison to the other sound cards it has weak bass and has a recessed sound.
2) M-Audio Delta 410. I'll be using this card for a whole of home audio setup. It has significantly better bass than the Audigy 2 ZS and slightly better soundstage and resolution.
3) M-Audio Revolution 7.1. This is the card in my home theatre PC and it produces a sound similar to the 410 but with a more forward sound and a slightly improved the soundstage
4) EMU 0404. This card has been getting rave reviews over at head-fi.org for headphone listening, and as its relatively cheap I thought I'd buy it to give it a try. I wasn't expecting much difference from the M-Audio cards but was pleasantly surprised that the bass was firmer and fuller, and the amount of detail in the sound increased. I also took the opportunity to remove the on board caps and output buffer, which added to the soundstage and surprisingly improved the "speed" (attack) response of the system and produced a clear, smooth treble response.
I'm now very happy with this setup, which gives a huge soundstage, high resolution, solid bass and the ability to resolve individual instruments in a complex passage (Tripath is famous for this). It is also very forgiving of poorer recordings, which is different to my main (and more expensive) setup which shows every flaw in a recording. So this little system has finally hit the
synergy of all its components, something I've found very hard to find when building / setting up a hifi system. Now to stop fiddling with it an enjoy the music
If you are looking for a soundcard for a PC based system, I'd recommend looking into the EMU 0404 & modding it, it certainly bests the M-Audio cards at least for this setup.
Next project for this setup is to add microprocessor control for mute & volume through a USB connection to the PC and writing a small amplifier management application on the PC to mute the amp when the PC shuts down & adjust the volume in software using a LM1972 volume chip. (did I say something before about stopping fiddling
Regards,
Dean