 
|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
|
|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
69.245.75.35
I have a PC based audio system, a tubed Pre and stand alone CDP based system and a battery powered flash drive playing uncompressed files.I spent thousands 3K to be exact on the tubed pre and CDP, I spent around $600 on my hand made PC based source, and I spent all of $169 on this flash drive player....and I be damned if I dont enjoy the sound of this cheap flash drive player better than ANYTHING....
I used to call myself an "Audiophile"....having this expensive set up, room treatments, high end wires, outlets, power cords, tubes..[I spent more on my Mullard NOS tubes than this flash drive player].
I am actually getting better stereo separation, sound stage, music more listenable [no harsh cd sound what so ever], full bottom end...bottom line I ENJOY listening now, where as before I would sometimes have to play certain CD's more only because they didnt sound so bad.... or I would spend weekends tweaking trying to find ways to smooth out the sound or fine tune it somehow to something more listenable.
Actually I dont know if I feel stupid, guilty, ashamed or just plain ol dumb founded and amazed.
As I type this, I am looking over at this little humble player sitting on top of my $1,000 sub [not being used] and next to $4K worth of gear [not being used] plugged directly into my amp....I spent twice as much on the AQ wires connecting it to my amp than it costs...amazing.
Follow Ups:
I have an IAudio playing FLAC and hooked this up to a Creek passive preamp. It was pretty decent but no where near as good as my PC-> M-Audiophile USB-> Theta Casanoava pre-pro.
because I haven't made a head-to-head comparison, and a CD player is much better about some things by design (like it's harder to flip albums like some kid with ADHD), but I'm pretty damned impressed/happy with my computer system.The only upgrade I've ever made to my 2004 laptop, or am ever planning to, is getting USB hard drives -- I got 550GB more space for Christmas on two external hard drives, in addition to the 200GB one I already had and my crappy 80GB internal.
I also finally got a real DAC... I had been using a home-theater receiver's digital in as a stand-in until I could get one (improving my PC's sound was a very recent idea and I had to restructure a bit). Now my chain:
PC -> (USB) -> USB-to-S/PDIF adapter -> (coaxial) -> Monarchy DIP Classic (not sure if this is needed or not but I like having it) -> (coaxial) -> piggybacked Monarchy 18B DAC (a few generations outdated but it's cheap as dirt and sounds great. I could do better, but that's for the future).
Very interesting. Using the DIP Classic, the sound is more refined, based on a comparison I did a year ago. I had the option of running optical out from onboard sound, coaxial out from PCI soundcard, or USB out, with or without the DIP Classic. Tried all combinations.
My first audio system with speakers that I owned, was PC based which started 7 years ago. So I am starting from the opposite end--came from a PC audio system, and discovered audiophile grade equipment afterwards.My experience is opposite... Soundcard with modifications could not match the focus, texture, and authority of $250 cd player. It is only until very recently that my PC system has finally surpassed that cd player in terms of overall emotional enjoyment. And I could not trump the cd player in terms of focus, soundstaging, imaging, but in terms of flow, emotion, naturalness.
The PC costs $3000, and continues to eat about $500-$1000 per year in hardware upgrades alone.A hifi cd player is cheap in comparison. No external display requirement, no need for graphics, cpu, memory, or storage upgrades.
And when Windows Vista and DirectX 10 hit? Oh boy, there goes another $3000 immediately. The AGP interface is gone, need new motherboard, need new DDR2 RAM, need new Dual-Core CPU, need new PCI Express DirectX 10 video card...
Adriel:This is not my personal experience.
I have managed to take a $750 Medion "Cicero" PC (2.93GhZ PIV Hyperthreading) and stream tri-amplified audio at 24/96 x 6 channels (left-low/mid/high) and (right-low/mid/high) with no dropouts. It has a variable speed oversize CPU fan (that barely spins with low CPU utilization), fanless power supply and no case fans.
Even when doing upsampling of Redbook 16/44.1 files to 24/96, doing realtime convolution, *and* using a VST based crossover plugin I am using less that 20% CPU, averaging closer to 15%. That's my HIGHEST utilization. With 2-channel playback and no DSP crossover or convolver I am using about 5% CPU.
The only times I get pop and click issues is when my output configuration I want to use results in clock skew due to using I/O that has different clock sources. There are many ways to overcome this issue, but it's not a CPU/memory resource issue - it's a clock source issue. Other than that, one just has to watch for rare but possible IRQ issues, or when VST plugins share resources with older video cards.
I am not sure why one needs to spend $3000 on a PC. I mean - for $3K worth of PC in 2006 you are talking about a serious amount of computing horsepower and a mega-tonne of storage. Could you describe your application so we could better understand why such a "beast" of a computer is needed?
I can't even imagine what $3K would get one in terms of performance. It would indeed be awesome... but necessary?
Cheers,
Presto
I think a maxed-out computer is a negative. You need a sufficient CPU to run any DSP's or upsampling. Any more and you creat excess heat, and will need to get rid of it with loud fans. Excess graphics capability means more RFI in the box.It's best to keep it as minimal as possible, just enough to get it to do what you need.
I agree that it is easy to get into having too much computer for an audio playback system. CDs require a data speed of a bit over 1Mb/sec. Run-of-the-mill hard drives, motherboards, memory chips, CPUs, ethernet and wireless connections are all easily capable of transfer speeds that are tens to hundreds of times faster than what CD audio requires. This even covers the needs of DVD-A or SACD when that media is demanding all it can.At the computer level, data is data and the goal is to get it to where it needs to be faster than the decoder requires it. Any basic computer you buy new these days can do that, especially if you're not burdening the machine with other simultaneous tasks. You don't need a $3,000 machine and constant upgrades to do this.
The focus is on the audio end, from the DAC forward. But now you're in the same boat whether the data was delivered straight from a CD transport or a hard drive.
I was getting glitch-free 24/88.2 upsampling with ASIO with a Pentium II Xeon at 450 MHz, before I had to replace it a few months ago. You don't need much CPU power for computer audio.
"The focus is on the audio end, from the DAC forward. But now you're in the same boat whether the data was delivered straight from a CD transport or a hard drive."Yes - that's very true. This is why not all PC based systems are created equal.
Cheers,
Presto
.
Here's a typical expense of a PC, not the best nor top of the line by any means. For example, the case represented below is 75 instead of a 150 top of the line aluminum case. With better parts, 3000 is easily reached or eclipsed.case: 75
power supply: 65
motherboard: 200
cpu: 300
hard drive 1: 150
hard drive 2: 150
video card: 250
sound card: 200
os: 100
ram: 400
monitor: 500
keyboard: 30
mouse: 60
optical drive: 90=2570
when I built mine I didnt spend nearly that much.....May I suggest you not build another PC, for you it would be cheaper to buy one already built.
Wow. I should be in the business of selling you PCs ;-)My PC (P4/3Ghz) ran about $800 three and a half years ago and has had no upgrades aside from additional hard drives in that time. It's still in service as both my home computer and as a music server (running SlimServer feeding Squeezebox units in two rooms) and should remain in place for at least another year. Given the general purpose nature of the computer, the only real costs involved on the audio side have been the price of the Squeezebox units ($300 each) and the extra hard drives (also about $300). All told, this has been a pretty low cost, high-end digital solution, and I don't see any reason to ever go back to a transport/CD player setup.
That amount of hardware gets you plenty of horsepower for music uses, surfing, word processing, e-mail and normal tasks.Only CAD, serious graphics work, and other "workstation" tasks really requires more.
I built several P4 3 gig units several years ago and my wife are still running them fine today.
I always build with a processor that's several steps down from the latest new thing, gob it up with memory, get a good motherboard and don't look back.
Granted, I put money into a high end sound card - but that sure isn't the cost of the box
do you need to keep making these "upgrades" to your PC?It takes very little processor power to run 44.1kHz redbook PC audio, and hard drives are cheap as dirt. There's absolutely no need to go crazy with PC upgrades to play beautiful music.
As far as Vista, I don't need it at all to continue using my audio PC, and I don't expect to offer any better SQ than my current setup with ASIO. In fact, I plan to avoid it like the plague for at least a year or two.
Hello, thanks for your response. You're correct that the most modest PC can play redbook. In fact, I could take my laptop right now, transfer music to my external SATA hard drive, and use it to replace the standalone music PC. It would be quiter, it could run totally on batteries for a short period of time, etc. Battery power laptop! Why didn't I think of that earlier? I could use that in an experiment to test my wall-powered PC.... I'll have to experiment with that. The reason I have not done so, is because it's a lot slower. I do not like to wait on the PC even for a split second. For instance, I have removed the 1/2 second delay on the Start Menu items, etc.The audiophile is a connoisseur of minor detail, and lives and explores life between shades that the ordinary person glances over with blind eyes. The audiophile is good at discernment and tailoring his tastes not only to music... because music is so grand and permeating of the universe and the soul, this ability extends to all things in life. Starbucks coffee becomes like Bose audio: "Supposed to be good by people who don't know better". He is a seeker of quality and the finest available material possessions available on earth that he cannot afford. He exercises control whenever possible, cooks delicious meals from scratch with excellent body and truth of timbre to the palettes, and seeks to tweak his music PC built using selected components for the purpose of increasing reliability, lowering seek time, and improving access to his digital music collection.
Ok, I'm up on the laptop system now and listening to music, big rig is powered down. The battery is charging up, but once it is charged fully I'll be able to listen while plugging and unplugging the power cord as the laptop sits in my lap. As low as the battery power is now, unplugging only nets me about 10 seconds of music before the laptop goes into standby mode.Without the noise of the fans from the big rig, I get a feeling I'm back to the cd player days. It's so quiet I can hear the background ringing in my ears.
> Without the noise of the fans from the big rig, I get a feeling I'm back to the cd player days.Your computer hardly needs to be in the same room as your stereo. My server is located in a different room a floor away from the stereo. The Squeezebox next to the stereo is quieter than a CD player, and once the data stream is collected, you're free to decode with as fancy a DAC as your heart desires. All this can be controlled with a Palm TX which even keeps the clicking of a keyboard out of that room. Or you can use the remote that comes with the Squeezebox.
It's funny that you mention not liking to wait on the PC "even for a split second," yet you're willing to wait for the batteries to charge.
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]