PC HT/Jukebox

[rgriffin25]

I am interested in how many of you make use of a computer in your HT set-up.
Explain how you use it in your Hometheater. (HTPC / Jukebox)

It also might be helpful to list some of your pc hardware. With my experience, not all pc hardware is created equal when trying to acomplish a easy to use HT-PC.

I am currently using my pc as a jukebox. I have tried on a couple of occations to fully integrate my pc. I finally came to the conclusion it was more work than it was worth. (First attempt was in Jan of 2002 so things have changed quite a bit since then.)

My computer:
AMD Athlon 2600+
512 MB DDR PC3200
Asus A7N8X-DLX (integrated 6ch sound card with RCA SPDIF out which works great!)
80 GB Maxtor Internal Drive
160 GB Western Digital Ext. HD USB 2.0 (Media drive)
Lite-on DVD/CD-rw Drive.
iTunes *
Powerstrip software (used to help scale or set display timings from PC to HDTV)
ATI Remote Wonder (rf remote used to change songs when not sitting at PC)

I highly recommend Apple iTunes. Not only is it a great source for buying music it also is great for organizing music. It also uses AAC or MP4 encoding which IMO is noticeably better than MP3.

Well that is my 2 cents.

 

[hopjohn]

Hey rgriffin what have been your experiences since using powerstrip? I considered using it before, but found it's interface a bit confusing and non intuitive. Have they made improvements to that software recently?

 

[rgriffin25]

"I finally came to the conclusion it was more work than it was worth."

Power Strip does work and was mentioned only as a reference for people having overscanning problems.
However it is difficult to use and requires quite a bit of patience. You might check out their website. http://www.entechtaiwan.com/index.shtm

 

[docferdie]

You'll need a different soundcard if you want "bit-perfect" SPDIF audio from PCM sources as nforce drivers don't bypass the winows kmixer.

 

[ThA tRiXtA]

All I got to say:

http://www.audioholics.com/showcase/DIY/build_HTPC_1.html

Good luck!

 

[docferdie]

Interesting read however your choice of soundcard is incorrect as no creative product that I know of preserves the PCM stream. It gets mangled in both the driver as well as the windows kmixer. What I would like is for people to be able to build something like the yamaha musiccast with better functionality and at a fraction of the cost.

 

[ThA tRiXtA]

no creative product that I know of preserves the PCM stream. It gets mangled in both the driver as well as the windows kmixer.QUOTE]

Perhaps I am not seeing the value of what you are saying?

So the soundcards that possess a digital optical out doesn't work?

 

[docferdie]

Lets say you put a CD into the CD-rom drive and use the digital out. If you are able to change the volume of the music via the windows mixer then that tells you that the PCM stream is being transcoded. Contrast this to a set top CD player which puts out a PCM stream that is bit identical to the original data on the CD-- and the only way to change the volume would be through the receiver. The acid test for this is the DTS 5.1 music CD--not DTS DVDs. If you try playing a DTS CD through the SPDIF on a Creative card, all you will get is noise and the receiver will fail to recognize the stream as DTS. On the otherhand a soundcard such as the m-audio sonica or transit allows the user to bypass the windows kmixer and gives you an SPDIF output that is considered "bit perfect" as the computer has not altered the data on the CD in any way.
Sound cards bit mangle the stream in different ways. It can range from resampling from 44 Khz to 48 Khz as most built in AC97 codecs do or resample from 44 to 44 (why creative does this I don't know).
The difference is both measurable and audible. The windows kmixer automatically sets a volume limit of around 90-95% for the original PCM stream so your volume setting would be a few notches higher for playback on the computer compared to something like the digital out of the DENON 2200.
Of course having a sound card that does "bit perfect" pass through isn't all peaches and cream as most of the models that do this are worthless or painful to configure when it comes to gaming or watching HDTV. A good combination is NVIDIA onboard SPDIF for most applications and the M-audio sonica for jukebox duty.

 

[House de Kris]

For my jukebox setup I use an AudioTron, and I like it very much for what it does. Everyone has their own reasons for doing things, here are mine:

1- Quiet. I don't like disc drive whine or fan noise in the same room I want to hear tunes. I can put the computer in another room.
2- No "serving" required. The only network audio device I've found so far that does not require the server run an application to stream the data out.
3- OS not important. It doesn't matter who makes the computer's OS or what version, as long as you can share a drive/folder it works. In fact, just stick NAS disk drives on your network and forget the whole OS issues.
4- Computer power not important. If it has a 10T ethernet connection, it will work.
5- Inuitive operation. If you can operate a cassette deck from a few decades ago, you can operate the AudioTron. Plus is has convinience features of today, to boot.
6- Bit perfect. Plays .wav files (bit perfect copies of CDs) and ships them out the SPDIF connector without editorializing on the way. Plays MP3 and those Windows compressed files too.
7- Rack mountable. Always a plus in my book, 1U in height.

In my specific case, I have a PentiumPro 150MHz w/64MB of memory machine running W2kPro (yes, you read that right - an increadibly old and slow machine) filled with a bunch of 60* and 80* drives. This is my long term storage machine. Contrast this to all the other network audio devices I've seen that require some app to be running on the server. Those boxes claim to need rather healthy CPUs just to send out data. And, a fair amount of memory. Plus, most will limit you to a small number of supported OSes. In addition, I've got my AudioTron separated from the host computer by two ethernet switches. Of the streaming type of other players, they require to be limited to no more than one switch between box and computer.

 

[rgriffin25]

docferdie,

I don't consider the music on my PC to be high quality. Considering it is a compressed copy of the original. Generally I use the computer for casual listening and for its amazing flexiblity. If I want high quality I usually use my HT for that. (SACD or DTS cds)


Could you post a few links pointing us to these "bit-perfect" sound cards? I am interested in doing some research on this.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Unregistered]

Learn something new every day.

Thanks Doc.

 

[ThA tRiXtA]

Umm that was actually me who said the above comment...

Guess I forgot to sign in!

 

[docferdie]

Not sure if this link will work.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?showtopic=5755&st=25&

alternatively you could go to this site and search for "bit-perfect" or "bypass kmixer". avsforum also has some discussions on this topic.

if you have an extensive DTS cd collection than an HTPC works as well. You could archive using windows media 9's lossless codec, cut the size to about 30-60% and playback using winamp with the appropriate sound card and viola you have hours and hours of DTS music without having swap CDs. It is truly fascinating to playback a *.wma and have the receiver recognize the DTS stream and play it back in full 6-channel surround. Well worth the pain of having a secondary sound card. Imagine 150 redbook and DTS albums in your hardrive occupying a mere 50 GB. You can literally groove the couch just listening to music. For reference the Yamaha musiccast claims about 100 CDs for 80 GB as it does not have a lossless compression system.

Oh and if you run windows 98 or older, apparently you'll have a much larger assortment of soundcards to choose from for bit perfect pass through although I haven't been able to verify this.

 

[rgriffin25]

docferdie,

At this point I must say that I am quite satisfied with my current configuration. If there is a pretty reasonable way to get higher quality sound from my PC then I may be interested.
Can you tell us what you use in your computer and how you made the decision on which products to buy?

 

[docferdie]

Pop in a USB card from m-audio (sonica, sonica theater, transit) for 50-100$ and you're good to go. I wanted the transit for it's optical output since that's what I had a lot of but impatience won out in the end as only the sonica theater was available at my local store--so now I'm using an av switcher for my coaxial input.
My primary soundcard is still the NVIDIA on board sound. I like the fact that it has an onboard dolby digital encoder for games. I can't really use the analog outputs of a soundcard as my multichannel input is already occupied by my DVD/SACD player.
As far as other things to do with HTPC I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Fusion HDTV III QAM to replace my fusion I. It is just too much of a hassle to keep on changing antenna positions and CBS is just so hard to get OTA. By the way nothing beats the image quality of HDTV over DVI.
Other fun things to do would be to have a wireless home network to share the music in the main server. I would actually like to see someone use the yamaha client with a PC server. You could probably build a PC client that's really barebones but you would still get stuck with the cost of the screen.
Anbody have any idea as how cheap you could make a PC music client for?

 

[rgriffin25]

Windows Media HD

Has anyone tried the Windows Media HD discs? I own the T2 Exteme edition and played it on my computer. It looks pretty darn good.

There are only a few titles available. They come as a 2 dvd set the 1st one with the dvd version and the second has the WM HD version. If you would like to know more click this link.

www.wmvhd.com

 

[docferdie]

it looks good but if you want to watch it in surround sound you have to use the analog outputs of the soundcard. another problem is that there are hardly any 1080p monitors to take advantage of the higher resolution. it seems very promising for HD-DVD though as I read somewhere that WM9 is being incorporated into the new DVD standard.