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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 soundResults:
• 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 systemWish 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 contentionThe 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 routerThe 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
Follow Ups:
any more detail on the Vista software? Is HD an upsampler? Will it work with squeeze box? thanks
Ok from what I can see u have put considerable time and effort into your system and it is quite impressive. But I think I have found a few things that may help with your problems. First off you want faster ripping speeds, try using a newer faster computer your not gonna rip very fast with a 6 year old computer, trust me I know ive treid:) I had an old Athlon 1.2ghz system that I was using and it was sloooow when ripping, my new dual core system does it in half the time. Second thing is WMP is not the best way to go for cd ripping, Ive found EAC rips sound better. And the third thing I can see is that you have all this great equipment and your using a Creative Audigy card!! not exactly know for its low jitter or good sound, try a pro-grade sound card or no soundcard at all and use a usb-> spdif converter. I hope this helps some. good luck and happy holidays!
as 'cheapskate' advised in his reply to the identical post over at another forum, an apple computer makes this easier - one reason being that windows adds or subtracts gain if your computer's volume is not set to 50% exactly, the other being that to get acceptable audio out of any computer, you should use USB instead of the built-in (cheap) audio hardware. in addition, windows has the K-Mixed issue, a component of Windows that modifies data before they go out to USB. gordon ranking from wavelength (maker of high-end USB DACs) recommends fixing that problem with ASIO4ALL.com, replacing the K-Mixer so you can send out unaltered data to the USB Port; he also likes Meedio (a front end application to display and listen) to be directed to use ASIO4ALL as it's output device.
Cool system, especially the Maggies.Seems like the Sound blaster is the weak link here, and you should be using something like Empirical audio's off ramp for better results.
Plenty of high end soundcards, but not so much for laptops.
nice setup, just fyi: in the next Windows (Vista) out in stores Jan 30th 07, they have a completely rewritten audio stack. I tested it and when you use their verified "hd" sound devices, the sound quality is phenomenal.
Very interesting system! Have you tried Jriver Media Center for the library management I have a good experience with it. Have you checked that the output is indeed bit perfect?If you are indeed bit perfect here is another thought that might account for the sound differences you are hearing.
When you play the CDs directly in you player the clock of the DAC is the master of the playback chain. Modern CD players work asynchronously under the control of the conversion clock.
However, when you use the digital input the crystal in the Audigy sound card is the clock master. Now it depends on the PLL and dejitter circuits in the player to recover a decent clock from the incoming digital data stream. I don't know how much effort Accuphase put into that specific aspect and so you might just be hearing much higher jitter.
Cheers
Hi Thomas,I'm currently using a Squeezebox but have become increasingly fed up with the SlimServer software. Every release is buggier than the last. Version 6.5 is unusable for me, and that was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I currently have SlimServer installed on a computer with a RAID5 array in my spare bedroom. I use a laptop with a wireless network connection on a table next to my listening chair in the living room. I control SlimServer via the web interface on the laptop in the living room. So there is streaming from the server to the Squeezebox - a wired hop from server to router, and a wireless hop from router to SB.
Here's the configuration I'd like to have. I'm thinking of getting a Linksys wireless music bridge. I'd connect the S/PDIF out to the input of my Benchmark DAC1. I'd like to have server software on the RAID5 computer in the spare bedroom. Then on the living room laptop, I'd like to have a native Windows client app controlling the server in the spare bedroom. So for streaming, I want only one wireless hop - from router to music bridge. I looked at the Jriver site, but their documenmtation of this type of setup is confusing. It appears to be written in the context of using the server to play music on the client that's controlling it. But in my case, there would be three devices involved - the server, the client controlling it, and the wireless music bridge on which the music is played. I want to totally avoid multiple wireless hops here. Can Jriver accomplish this? If so, would I need two licenses (one for server, one for client)?
...I will check in the Jriver forums to get further info.
> I want to totally avoid multiple wireless hops here.
> Can Jriver accomplish this?J. River should really document the capabilities of their product more thoroughly. I'll tell you what I have learned and let you decide whether it will do what you want.
There are some powerful capabilities and some limitations in architecture.
- each Media Center 11/12 program can output to more than one soundcard. (Multiple zones.)
- MC 11/12 can output to a uPnP device. So you might be able to output from the music server PC across a wireless network to a uPnP device different part of the house. Check the J. River forum for more on this and for info on specific uPnP devices. (The Linksys device you mention has been discussed as well. I think it takes over all soundcard output so it doen't work with other output devices.)
- The Media Server capability lets one copy of the program have read/write access to the library and other copies of the s/w have read only access. Each copy of MC 11/12 outputs to soundcards or devices connected to it.
- The MC library database is separate from the music files themselves. It can be on a different PC from the music files. (The library should be on the same PC as the copy of MC useing that library. Each copy of MC could have its own library of a common set of music files. A change to one library is not reflected in the libraries on other PCs. Some users run scripts to reconcile multiple libraries.
- You can use a third party program such as Microsoft's Remote Desktop feature in Win XP Pro or VNC to operate one PC from a different PC. You can have the VNC client running on several PCs at the same time all controlling the same server PC. I've tried this using Real VNC and its works fine. You can find discussions of this approach on the J. River forum. I think this might do what you want in connection with a uPnP device.
> If so, would I need two licenses (one for server, one for client)?
Once you get a license, you can use it on all your PCs.
For in depth ansers I would try their forum.The Jriver license covers all machines in your household so you only need one. For what you describe I believe you have a couple of options.
There is an integration package to drive a squeezebox from Media Center directly.
http://www.mail-archive.com/plugins@lists.slimdevices.com/msg07917.html
If you want to use a Linksys you will want to use the UPnP server functionality.
As a control point I just use remote desktop back to my main server machine but I don't know exactly how you would control the playback to the Linksys box so I suggest you ask on thr forum.
What you describe is a pretty common scenario.
Cheers
Thomas
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