Aduiphile Grade soundcards

Hi Fellow enthusiasts,
I am interested in building a HIFI (audiophile grade) PC. The PC config is no problem. However I am not sure as to what type of sound card I should buy! any ideas??? I would sure appreciate some advice.
Thanks
Ehzaz

 

I'd take a look at the M-Audio range.

My Audiophile 24/96 is the business, sounding great. The biggest problem with PC-based sound is noise (from fans etc.).

I find this dominates any attempts to get decent sound, the noise floor in the vicinity of the PC is to high!

Andy.

 

In answer to the point about fans - there are some pretty funky heatsinks made by a company call Zalman (I think). They don't require fans, and they make them suitable for most chips requiring cooling (CPU, GPU etc...)

 

For anything above around 600Mhz you are still going to need some sort of fan, be it a dedicated cpu fan or a case fan.

I'm almost finished my audio server, just waiting for the wireless card for my Ipaq (used to select the playlists) and an M-audio Audiophile USB.

This is the usb version of the 2496 Andy suggested. It supposedly gives slightly better sound quality than the pci version as it uses its own power supply. It also has a better headphone output and volume knobs for the analogue outputs.
The main reason I have gone for it though is because it allows me to put the soundcard with my hifi, and the pc a distance away, hopefully where it can't be heard.
Not cheap at £165 though.

At the moment I am using a Sony USB-Optical Spdif converter into a M-Audio Superdac. It does not quite sound as good as my cheap Sony CDP. With a bit of luck my soundcard will be here tomorrow and I'll be able talk a little more objectively about it.

My struggle at the moment is to silence the hard disks. I'm using an old Maxtor drive with Windows 2000 on and it has stopped obeying the power management settings. I can't hear it when playing music, but at 4:00 in the morning it drives me bloody mad with a slight high pitched whine.

 

you could always go for liquid cooling although it's been a while since i looked at this so i'm not sure what the state of the art is here. alternatively there are a number of wireless audio servers which are slient in operation. wi-fi has i believe enough bandwidth to transmit cd quality audio uncompressed. that way you could have your pc out of the way upstairs and a small widget on your hi-fi rack which just handles the reception and dac stuff..
cheers

julian

 

Check out the RME Digi PAD 96/8

It costs about £230 but is apparently worth it.

I'm not too clued up on this stuff though sorry

 

An alternative option is to get a cheaper card that has a good digital out (eg Terratec Aureon, Videologic Sonicfury, etc... just as long as it isn't a creative) and an external DAC, that you can also use with a CD player or whatever. I use an M-audio SuperDAC fed by my terratec aureon for PC music. There are plenty of good DACs out there with multiple inputs that you can pick up for not too much money, like the superdac, cambridge DACmagic, Audio Alchemy DDE, etc.

 

Look over this website Quiet PC

I think the biggest difference made to my PC noise was getting the 'SilentDrive Acoustic Enclosure - £24.00' You put your hard disk in it and it really does cut the noise down. The new 10,000 RPM drives wont like it though, due to heat.

Also the 'AcoustiCase - £89' will make a big difference.

For CPU get a 'Heatlane Zen Fanless CPU Cooler - £49 DO NOT buy Zalman, they suck! My brother had a 'silent' one and it was quite hearable in my studio!

and for the power supply keep what you have but open it up and change the fan for a 'Ultra-Quiet 80mm Fan - £9'

Put it all together and you have a £171 bill and a truly silent computer!!

If you want to save money scrap the PC case and just stick a lot of thick carpet everywhere you can (other than one hole for fresh air to come in, I leave my unused PCI slots open) inside your current case.

I use a very similar setup in my studio. The only difference is I soundproofed the case myself with 'Brown Bread Sound Dead' and some thick carpet and my CPU cooler is a Cooler Master silent heatpipe. If you use the stuff above from Quiet PC it will be even quieter!

For soundcards I use an Edirol DA2496 which is about £380, but you can get a cheaper card as you only want two channel output. Do look at the Edirol range though.

 

"and for the power supply keep what you have but open it up and change the fan for a 'Ultra-Quiet 80mm Fan - £9'"

I went one better than that and made myself a passive one. I'm slowly gaining confidence in its reliability, but I think I shall end up removing it from my case and using it externally. I used an aluminium box for the PSU case and it radiates a lot of heat into my PC case.

I'm making myself an enclosure for my hard disks, waiting for some longer screws before I can put it all together though.

For CPU cooling I'm using a Thermalright SK7 with a 80mm Panaflow fan running on 5v. Typically see around 55deg in normal use with my Athlon 900 and it is dead quiet, even with the case open.

 

There are a few good quality fanless PSUs out there if you look. They are quite expensive and they have massive heatsinks that stick out the back of the PC but they do work and they are silent.

I went for a Nexus 350W PSU with a 120mm internal fan. It's not totally silent but very nearly so - not loud enough to be noticeable even in quiet moments in the music.

Be careful about some of the fancy CPU coolers as they are quite heavy and can put too much strain on the CPU socket and motherboard. This is particularly so if your motherboard is vertical as most of them are these days.

When I can find a home theatre case I am happy with, I'll be going for an all-copper Zalman Flower with a 9cm super-quiet fan. In the meantime I use a Copper-Aluminium Flower which is not as efficient but is much lighter.

 

What's so wrong with Creative soundcards, so long as they have digi out? Seriously - as I'm using their old SBLive! which is head and shoulders over the POS standard card I had. Not using it into my hifi via my MD (as surrogate DAC) yet, but will be...

I intend to get into computer music soon-ish so I know I'll need to update it, but as a stopgap surely they're not that bad?

 

They are good unless you want to use professional audio softwere like Cubase SX, Logic, CoolEdit pro or SoundForge.

Okay if you will only ever use the audio on that soundcard, but if you want to swap between a soundcard that has propper sample-rates and the SB it will be fooooooked! It will have audio at 44.1Khz and try to play it at 48Khz.. or the other way around. Very annoying!

 

Lets just say that I want to use my pc as a server for my music. I will eventually rip most of my CD's to the 200gig Serial ATA HDrive. I am looking to connect the sound card to my Denon AVC A1 and onto my Tannoy Definiton Speakers. I do not want to use the DACs on my amp. Hence the request for suggestions of an extremely high quality sound card. The case and mainboard I have chosen are extremely quiet. so is the intel 2.6Ghz HT processor. Now my main focus is on the s/card.

Ehzaz

 

I got a Waveterminal 192X

24bit 192k £239

It's by Egosys...

Regards

 

Thanks a lot guys. You al have been a great help. I must admit theres a lot of good soundcards out there, unfortunately Creative SB is not one of them. However I have chosen for the Terratec EWS88. Will let you guys know how it sounds once I get it and install it.

Thanks and regards
Ehzaz

 

Now that I've got a 2nd system in my office (finally!) I'm thinking about upgrading my sound card (currently SB Live!) too allthough I have it hooked up to my amp via an ultra cheapo 3.5mm jack -> RCA cable and it's not sounding bad at all now it's hooked up to a proper amp and speakers (Arcam Alpha 6+ and Tannoy mx2).

The M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 looks like just the ticket but do audiophile sound cards like that work with games? I've heard that most pro soundcards don't support DirectSound etc...

Michael.

 

Hi Michaelab,
what you're looking for is the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 at http://www.m-audio.net/index.php?do=products.main&ID=0ed0405324041d8025a955aa6ae2db1c

Go check it out.

Best_Of_Luck
Ehzaz

 

I've got a Tascam US-122 USB audio / MIDI port device connected to my laptop. I've just had a fiddle in the XP control panel and I can get it to play both .wav and .mid files from Windows Media player, despite the Tascam not having any onboard MIDI sound sources (its just a recording device that also has MIDI ports) – I suspect its rerouting the XP software MIDI sounds. Dunno if this would work with games though, I don't have any!

Tony.

 

Michael - The cheaper terratec cards do draw on their experience with pro cards, so the Aureon and DMX series cards offer good quality output (so far in advance of anything creative have to offer). Probably the option to go for for gaming with quality is the DMX 6Fire. Get the LT version if you're not going to use the front panel drive bay thingy.

 

Hi Again,
Might buy the Terratec DMX 6 myself as I just heard that the EWS88 is no-longer available.

Rgds
Ehzaz