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My audiophile music server system

Posted by Bruce-in-Philly (A) on December 10, 2006 at 18:04:07

First, please do not flame me for my audiophile pursuits or highjack this thread discussing the value or fantasy of high fidelity. Just let people like me wallow in our delusions.

The purpose of this post is to present my very workable audiophile server system as I am sure there are folks like me out there pounding their head against a wall trying to figure out this vexing puzzle.

My audiophile music server system:

Objectives:
• Create an audiophile sound system using network storage for digital music
• Network storage required as to be expandable (just add another drive) and accessible by any PC on the network (link into stereo, play from PCs and all at the same time playing different files)
• Get sound quality as close to a CD in my CD player as possible
• Any lossy compression is unacceptable due to sound quality degradation
• Must have no-effort library organization, tagging, management and see album covers (I have a huge music collection 1500+ CDs)
• Must have no manipulation of digital stream; I want pure bit-for-bit transfer with no jitter to the DAC (digital to analog converter)
• Use off-the-shelf common components and old, used, cheap computers (to make this system livable in a home, you will need a dedicated PC in your home stereo rack but it can be an old XP clunker)
• Ability to use audiophile DACs independent of the computer-based delivery system
• Use my existing, home stereo to deliver the sound

Results:
• 95% there. For some reason the sound is not as good as my direct CD player but still excellent and very high fidelity (I use my CD player’s DACs for digital to analog conversion so I have a great A-B comparison setup for comparing a CD with its ripped WAV files)
• Perfect for high quality casual listening and will stand as an audiophile system

Wish List:
• Remote control over PC / Foobar player
• Faster ripping
• Faster library management from Windows Media Player 11 (library speed is really terrible; for playback, you will be using Foobar’s very decent library facility to search and play, you will need to manipulate the library a bit and therefore you will be using the ripper’s library tools especially if your CD collection spans more than one disk drive)
• Perfectly reproduced music (HA!)

Effort and Challenges to get here:
• Very limited information on audiophile pursuits in computing convergence
• ‘Net seams not to care about perfect reproduction, just cool gadgetry
• ‘Net likes gadgets such as digital sound processing software that just wrecks the listening experience (for me… just leave me alone on this ok?)
• ‘Net only seemed to care about ripping compress/decompress speed and file sizing; no one seems to care about audio quality
• Vendors of sound cards don’t care about perfect transfer, they are catering to the gadget-buying public; they produce little to no data for folks like me scanning the huge selection of sound cards so buying a card is a gamble (I purchased the Audigy only because they had a bullet in their technical documentation that allowed for 44.1 and bit-for-bit throughput settings)
• Window sucks royally as a music delivery system – they up-sample everything to 48K and they do a very poor job of it resulting in really cloudy, muddy, and harsh sound quality and you have no control over the bit stream; on top of that, Microsoft provides virtually no usable information on their architecture; nor does Dell and frankly, I don’t really know who is to blame here but my research points to Microsoft’s underlying architecture
• You would think with what I want, simple 100% accurate bit-for-bit transfer, would be the easiest, cheapest thing to do!
• Rippers are slow and have bad library management (tried ‘em all! Media Monkey, EAC, WinAmp. etc. etc.) and Windows Media Player 11 is the best (not good, just the best)
• This took about 1 year of on and off-again tinkering with huge amounts of experimentation (thank goodness my Accuphase interprets many different standards and provides a display of the sampling rate input to it)

The Home Network:

• Maxtor 500 Gig & Maxtor 300 Gig network drives
• Linksys wireless G network (WRT54G as access point only)
• Linksys router/firewall (BEFSX41)
• No Linksys “speed booster”
• I like Linksys because their ports are switched and not shared hubs eliminating one source of network contention

The Rip Station (get my CDs into storage):
• 6-year old Dell Desktop (used only for ripping and library management)
• Windows XP
• Windows Media Player 11, error correction on (best library organization I found)
• WAV rips (storage is cheap so why compress?)
• Connected to network via Ethernet (100 mbit) only because I didn’t want to spend money for a wireless card for this clunker and the PC is a few feet from my router

The Player (stereo playback):
• 3-year old Dell laptop (used only for music playback) located in my home stereo rack
• Windows XP
• Linksys wireless USB 2.0 G
• Foobar 2000 player (Windows Media Player and others just won’t work!)
o No sound manipulation (equalizers etc.)
o Native 44.1; no sample conversions
o Direct kernel streaming to bypass any manipulative components (critical feature!!!)
o Buffer set to max to eliminate juddering from drive or network contention
o Foobar setup: http://www.uoregon.edu/~jroullie/mysetup.html (thanx dude! You “get it”) (you will need this setup as Foobar is tough to use without an enhanced configuration such as this)
• SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS PCMCIA card
o 44.1 (setting)
o Bit-for-bit transfer (setting)
o Uninstalled Audigy mixer/volume control via Windows XP (just in case)
o Not using its DACs; just using it for digital transfer out
o Optical out
• Audio Alchemy DTI Pro 32 (for jitter reduction; not required but does improve sound)
o Optical in
o Dither set to “off” (16 bit transfer)
o Coax out
• Accuphase DP-67 CD Player (has digital inputs so can use as a DAC)
• 2 VTL Deluxe 300 tube amplifiers
• Magnepan 20 speakers
• MIT cabling Accuphase-to-VTL-to-Magnepan

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Kimber Kable

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