Who needs yamaha musiccast?

[docferdie]

I was at tweeter the other day when I noticed someone looking at the yamaha musiccast. It seems simple enough. You pop in the CD and rip to PCM in a few minutes. But this comes at a premium I looked at the pricetag and it was over 2 grand. At that price you can easily build 2 or three hometheater PCs that could store 2 to 3 times as much music.
Another advantage of PCs is that you can use lossless codecs to compress your collection and reduce the space occupied to about half to one third.
A concern raised on other forums is that the windows kmixer mangles the bitstream resulting in altered SPDIF output. This is probable true for a lot of the soundcards in the market however models such as m-audio sonica and sonica theater--and likely m-audio transit--allow unadulterated "bit perfect" digital pass through. These cards are a pain for games and other everyday tasks but for the purpose of set top level music SPDIF they can't be beat. The acid test for unmangled bit streams is playing back a DTS music CD. These cards are able to do this provided you use winamp or similar software that allows "kernel streaming" or "ASIO output"
I encourage anybody with a sizeable CD collection to try this out. As long as you're listening through digital connections then this will give you a kick-*** jukebox that sounds as good as any standalone CD player.

 

[Martin_S]

Not me

I recently picked up an inexpensive 500mHz PIII Dell for use as a jukebox, and I've been wondering about sound cards that bypass the Windows kmixer.

Do you suppose all m-audio products do? I once called them about using their DiO 2496 pro-line card as just a plain-ol' audio card for playing out of Winamp or iTunes, but the guy was clueless.

They key thing I'm after is a digital out in the form of coaxial SPDIF, hopefully unmolested by kmixer. The jukebox is phisically some distance away from the HT receiver, so I need to do a long cable run (about 60 feet needed) using digital audio baluns for coaxial SPDIF over Cat 5.

But if I can get a "clean" digital out from one of their consumer cards for almost half the price, I might as well do that. I just need to find someone who knows about these things.

 

[docferdie]

some of the M-audio PCI cards like the revolution need tricked up drivers to bypass kmixer. The USB card on the other hand do it out of the box. The sonica and sonica theater have coaxial SPDIF and the transit has an optical SPDIF. Happy compiling.