Help! Losing grip! Slipping towards the dac side =:-o

Yes folks, 'tis true. There are a few changes afoot at technobear towers. Given that I now have:

1) a shiny new Seagate Barracuda 250GB second hard disc with my entire CD collection on it (uncompressed);

2) a wireless network;

...I thought I would take a look at one of these Squeezebox thingamewotsits, so off I went to the Slim Devices website.
I ended up downloading SlimServer to see what it would make of my music library. After a little tinker with the settings to teach it that my music is stored like:

/GENRE/ALBUM/TRACKNUM-ARTIST-TITLE.WAV

...and a quick re-scan, it has managed to resolve all my genres, albums, artists and tracks. This means I can continue to use Creative Mediasource to rip CDs and feed my Zen Touch and SlimServer will keep up with the changes. I am impressed!!!

So impressed in fact that I have ordered a Squeezebox 2

What have I done? The dac side beckons

 

Chris,

Embrace it. It's the only way to listen to non vinyl discs.

Regards,

Stuart.

PS - NOS DAC, you know you want to!

 

Oh, BTW - why not using EAC to rip and convert to FLAC? Saves space to delay HD upgrades and allows tags to be added to make Slimserver's job of recognising your collection even easier? Saves wireless bandwidth as well, but I'm coping (using SB1 which converts FLAC to WAV on the server to stream over the eather).

 

thank the lord you went and bought a Seagate drive!

good job tb

 

The Zen Touch came first and it was supplied with Creative MediaSource software so I used that to rip my CDs. I discovered very early on that MP3 is not for me, not even on the move, so I ripped all the CDs as WAV because the Zen Touch doesn't support FLAC or any other lossless formats. I figured if I rip to WAV then I have complete flexibility. Network bandwidth is hardly an issue - I don't think I'll miss 1.4 Mbps out of 54

So what's this NOS DAC all about then? Is it any good?

 

Fair enough - I've got somewhat less bandwidth to play with. Wouldn't worry much about DACs 'till you've got the SB2 in the system. The SB1 definately needs a DAC however by all accounts the SB2 is much better out of the box.

Regards,

Stuart.

 

chris,
you can rip to flac using eac (getting a much better quality rip) and the nconvert to whatever format you like using something like foobar2000 to conver to wma or whatever lossy format you like.
find yourself a good dac and flog your other sources - you know you have to...
cheers

julian

 

Just do it. At some point I'll get a hard drive for all my discs. I use a nos DAC and I love it. I want to get to the point were I just store everything (dvd's etc) on a HDD and thats it, that day will be soon.

 

I've done the same, all CD's now on hard disk running through the Squeezebox2 (best of the media players from my experience, I own them all!) then through a DAC

If you have a PDA, stick in a wireless card and then you have a colour screen remote with track details, album cover etc.

Also, download the random plug-in as I don't think they have included it as standard yet.

Enjoy!

Andrew

 

Please could someone explain flac. Is it a program that rips cd's into flac or is it more complicated? An idiots quide or a website that explains would be helpful.

Rod

 

FLAC is just the type of file made from the CD and played back through the squeezebox using EAC (exact audio copy), its a lossless compression format which is used to store the music. I think!

I have to say I'm very tempted myself to give up on CD players for now - my CD transport is playing up occasionally, and a replacement good transport to use with my DAC is serious money, especially if you want to start modding (I'd like a transport like the TEAC VRDS-10 or similar with trichord DOB, which would be £500ish or higher).

But given the apparent extremely low jitter of the squeezebox (making it a very good transport), and the fact that much of my music is already loaded onto my PC, I can't help but think a more cost effective solution would be this given I already have a decent PC with ~400GB of Seagate storage space, and a good DAC....the ease of use of the squeezebox is better too, no disk swapping required.

 

flac (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an open source music format which allows you to store 44.1 audio in roughly half the space raw wav files would use. it's probably the most developed non-proprietory lossless audio compression system out there and is supported by numerous hardware manufacturers
eac (Exact Audio Copy) is a ripping program which can rip using various audio codecs (of which flac is one). the 'big deal' about eac is that it is extraordinarily paranoid about getting exacly what is on the cd onto hard drive even down to allowing you to tune the thing for your particular cd/dvd drive if you are so inclined (and have suitable cd's).
the combination of the 2 makes audiophile quality hdd based systems a possibility (unless you are one of those vinyl only nutters in which case you are beyond all hope )
i believe that flac also has the ability to encode 48, 96 and 192 sample rates as well (i'm only positive about 48 though) so if you have access to higher quality music then you're covered - although the sb2 and most dac's can't operate over 48k (some go to 96 but this is on the raggy limits of the s/pdif interface with 192 requiring proprietory dual s/pdif links).

 

Creative MediaSource also is very thorough about getting everything off the CD. It will slow down to 1x speed if necessary and will switch to low level commands and retrieve the CD content sector by sector if necessary so stupid protection systems don't stop it.

Did I read somewhere that the performance of the Squeezebox 2 can be considerably elevated by giving it a decent linear power supply (I believe it comes with a switching PSU)?

 

This is good stuff.

 

eac is a bit more paranoid that just dropping to single speed have a look at: http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ and click on technology for the lowdown.

aparently the sb2 can be improved by adding a decent linear psu (with regulation preferably) however it's unclear if this is only for analogue or for digital as well - that said a jitter measurement of 65ps is pretty special anyway - certainly for somethign costing under 200 quid. personally i use a switch mode psu from maplin with a slightly 'stiffer' supply than the wall wart. i can;t really tell the difference between the two but the maplin supply has an iec socket which allows me to run everything off a hydra (one plug for 4 bits of kit). other reported improvements involve removal of the analogue stage altogether, removal of the 2nd clock (used for mp3 and 48khz decoding iirc so be careful with that one). there's loads of stuff on this over on the slim devices forum where slim devices ceo sean is very active in the audiophile section.

 

I have downloaded eac. However, I am probably being thick, but I cannot see an option for flac. Any suggestions?

thanks

Rod

 

Hi,

FLAC isn't packaged with EAC. You'll need to get the FLAC software and point EAC to it. This is configured in the Compression Options, choose to use an external compressor and point it to the FLAC file.

Regards,

Stuart.

 

You have probably already seen this:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/forumdisplay.php?f=7

But Slim Devices Community has an audiophile room which has a few postings from companies that modify the SB2.

 

Looky here, scroll to the bottom for the FLAC specific instructions

http://www.saunalahti.fi/cse/EAC/index.html

 

Cracking thunderstorm going on here

Alas, the twenty minutes worth of typing about my new toy just vanished into the ether as the PC rebooted