Building a PC as a High Performance Digital Stereo Source

[tomo22]

So right you are as Winston Churchill Said To The Lady Who Said You Are Drunk His Reply You Are Ugly But I will be sober in the Morning.

 

[coylh]

Many enjoy FLAC through foobar2000. I find that it takes me longer to tag the tracks than rip them, so I'm the slow part of the process.

 

[sholling]

A few weeks ago I completely rebuilt my music server. It's been a long process because I was hoping to reuse as many parts as possible. And to make use of parts I had laying around so I could save a few bucks for other hobbies. Well that didn't entirely work out. The case had to be replaced because I wanted a media/desktop style case. I selected the Antec NSK2400 for its exceptionally quiet design. They don't lie. I've gotten the case's slow spinning 120mm fans all dialed in so that they're keeping things cool with little fan noise.

I've been fighting some hardware issues along the way. For example the servos in my first go-round 500GB Seagate turned out to be really loud (it clucked like a freaking chicken), so after much research I replaced it with a much quieter 500GB Western Digital. The freebie ECS motherboard I got from Fry's had USB issues, etc.

The biggest change has been the sound card. I would up swapping out the AuzenTech for a Bluegears 7.1 Channel 24-bit 192KHz card. Don't let the low price fool you. This is one fine sound card. Easily the equivalent of a lot of cards costing twice as much.

I'm still debugging some final issues. The main one being a very intermittent static hiss/crackle. Almost that sick hiss/crackle a blown tweeter makes but in weird places in the music. Ive gone through two motherboards and two brands of sound cards and it still shows up once in a great while. I'm starting to think it might be RF leakage from the power supply. One thing that has helped a lot was rerouting the hard drive's SATA cable further from power cables. This reduced a very intermittent problem by at least 95%. Anyway the server is tied into my receiver via an optical cable. To be honest I'm really pleased with the sound and how well it works. Now if I can just chase down that last bug I'll be one really happy camper.

Anyway for the curious I put together my parts list and included links to the vendor (Newegg) so that anybody interested can get specs and read other user reviews.

Parts List:
Antec NSK2400 Case (fans set to low)
Intel Core 2 Duo e6600
ZEROtherm CF900 92mm CPU Cooler (whisper quiet)
MSI 945GM3 motherboard
2x1 GB of Crucial memory
ATI X600 PCI-E video card.
Western Digital 500GB HD
Bluegears b-Enspirer 7.1 Channels 24-bit 192KHz sound card (beyond awesome)
EDIMAX EW-7128G 802.11g card
Rosewill RCR-103 media reader
Samsung DVD 20x burner (so-so)
SpecResearch wireless keyboard with built in trackball
Anyware HA-IR01SV Infrared MCE Remote Control (not hardly used)

Software:
Windows Vista Home Premium
WinAmp Pro
NOD32

 

[Maddmaster]

PC Media Center

I am new to this forum but not to the subject. I too started putting together a PC to be used as a media server. The problem I ran into is because the size of my CD collection (approaching 3700 and growing) I have to use several hard drives. Currently I have 3 500GB drives. I think my first mistake was using Itunes as my library. I rip everything at the highest bit rate so hard drive space gets used more than normal MP3 files. Once the first drive was full Itunes popped up with an error message that the drive is full. At that point you are dead in the water. It does not give you an option to store on a different drive. I went into Preferences and changed the Library to the next drive. I am not sure if Itunes sees both drives and knows what track is on which drive because I made a backup copy of the full drive (which is only 250GB) that gave me the error message. Once I fill the 2nd drive I will be able to tell if changing the Library location worked.

I thought about a server but the cost is more than I want to invest at this point.

 

[fmw]

Dan, I just went through the whole process myself. I ripped my CD's using Windows Media Player to 320 MP3's. It took about 2-4 minutes per CD and I have thousands of CD's. The truth is the rips are sonically excellent. I can't really distinguish them from the original CD. If I could, then I know I would be listening to equipment instead of music. Yes I'm a recovering audiophile. I gave that up years ago. I realize ripping them to FLAC would make them lossless but I don't notice the loss so it doesn't matter for me. I tried it. I ripped several to FLAC and didn't notice the difference. As a long time audiophile, I can tell you my MP3's sound really good.

My music files are located on two computers on my network and backed up on a NAS. That makes 3 complete copies of the files. I use a Slim Devices Squeezbox to interface the music between my computer network and my receiver through a wireless router. The setup works flawlessly and delivers excellent sound quality. I'm thinking about adding a Squeezebox to my 2 channel system as well. It is in the same room as my CD collection but the Squeezebox is so convenient, I prefer it to fooling with the discs.

I offer this only to suggest to the forum readers that taking a simpler approach can also yield very good results.

 

[krabapple]

EAC is one of the most "brutal" of the copying software. It takes me about 25 to 30 minutes to copy the average CD.

Dan, that's nuts. Even in test&copy mode, where the disc is being read twice, EAC shouldn't take that long to copy a CD unless the CD is scratched or unless you are forcing your rips to proceed at low speed (1x, 2X)...something there's really no reason to do these days.

Consider also using dbPoweramp iinstead of EAC-- it incorporates Accuraterip, which is a convenient way to 'ensure' (or at least make it very likely) that your rips are bit-perfect. It does so by comparing your rip to a database of other people's rips. EAC can also be set up to use Accuraterip.

As an alternative to Winamp for playback, consider foobar2000. It's open source, high multifunctional, and highly configurable (i.e, geeks love it ;> ) It can be set up to bypass kmixer.
You can also use it to rip CDs, via a Nero plugin.

My setup is : all CDs ripped to an external drive (two Maxtor OneTouch 500GB drives actually, as one is for backup), compressed as FLAC files, decoded by foobar2000 on a laptop and streamed wirelessly as digital to my AVR via a Linksys Music Bridge, which is connected to the AVR (a Pioneer Elite 74txvi) via optical input.

 

[krabapple]

You have spent a lot of time and energy creating this system and you are obviously happy with the results.

However what ever program you use to store your music is only as good as the quality of what you are copying. To back up your collection if they are only on CD then use disk imaging software. This gives you 100% including the flaws. Then use something like demon tools to mount your image and you will get good results. If this is to technical please come back and I will explain more.

Every conversion process will degrade performance so imaging is best and don't worry about error correction because the software will tell if it can not copy bite for bite.

Nonsense. Disc imaging is great if you need to someday make an exact duplicate of the CD. If you just need the *tracks* stored or duplicated exactly, ripping as separate tracks is fine, and there is no audible or technical difference in quality. Also, not all conversions are degrading -- lossless compression for example , is lossless.

The only sound cards with any quality are very few and far between I suggest you do some more research.

More nonsense. There are more high-quality cards out there today than ever before. Besides, he's streaming digital information from the card, all he has to do is ensure it has a decent, nonresampling digital output. Doesn't have to cost a ton either --there's a cheap Chaintek out there that does bit-perfect digital out.

 

[krabapple]

Many enjoy FLAC through foobar2000. I find that it takes me longer to tag the tracks than rip them, so I'm the slow part of the process.

Most rippers can do automatic tagging via freedb. Of course those data aren't always correct, but it gets you 99% of the way there for pop/rock/jazz etc. Classical is a whole 'nother can of worms...

 

[drjt87]

I personally use EAC to copy (if just to eliminate minor scratches), then I use foobar2000 to play and label. I use FLAC because of the smaller size of the files.

I have about 200GB of music (5-600 CDs) which I put on 2 hard drives (2 copies that is). This way its available as a backup. I have had parts of files get corrupted just because of the way hard drive works. Obviously I don't use RAID.

Like a poster above, I find that labelling is the most time consuming part.

Sorting the CDs, I use the disc ID to sort, and I use foobar2000 to automatically rename and sort into appropriate folders.

Only problem I have now I finishing off the labelling of my music. Oh... and getting a better music system.

 

[zzz111]

Thank you Dan for sharing

Very good article Dan, I'm registering just to say thanks to you. I feel the need because when I first considered PC HIFI, the computer guys usually use cheap active speakers, and the audiophiles don't usually think PCs do them more than internet surfing. Given that you came from the audio world, your article convinced me to give it a try. I'm now more than a happy man with my system. [foobar/APE on old toshiba laptop - ASIO - benchmark usb - krell (sorry you don't seem to have reseller here in Shanghai, otherwise i'd have given it a try - B&W]

One other thing after browsing through the posts, I Just don't quite get it why some complained so much about manually putting in the album info, don't you guys use freedb to get these info online? I'd say you guys are really hardworking people, but you don't need to do that at least 95% of the time.