Let's get digital

puma,
my music server is a 6 year old pII 400 that's had windows xp installed on it, 256mb of extra ram and a sata card / large hdd array added. none of this has requires mobo, processor or psu upgrades and it's running just fine thank you. music serving is not an arduous task and the 486 you mention could probably cope no problems - especially as the server s/w i use has linux versions.
there are always uses that you can put an old machine to. of course beyond a certain point the technology becomes untennable but until the next big paradigm change - which is still a while off yet - a pentium or late generation 486 is still useful.
gary,
if tom chooses his dac wisely and uses a short length of good coaxial digital i/c. there is no reason why he won;t get 90% of the performance of his cds whilst spending considerably less. also he may find that he betters it in certain areas (although it's probable that in others it won't). personally i auditioned the cdx2 (a near enough 3k cdp) and prefer the sound of my sub 1k pc audio setup. of couse everyones mileage may vary.
cheers


julian

 

Julian.

Your argument stands on the assumption no money has been spent.

I am not going to start an argument about the relative value of kit because I know it is a pointless one.

But heres the point, you have some kit which is 90% as good as a CDX2.

Tom has already purchased and presumably enjoyed his CDS2/Powersupply.

Tom has some kit which is subjectively 110% better than a CDX2.

As such there is 20% difference. Dependent on your outlook that is a significant margin. Tom has already spent the money and reaped the benefits, now the new way will have to offer more than convenience, and I can't argue that it is convenient. nut it has to be better, just because it produces good sound for little money is not the point, the point is at some point Tom felt that the price of a CDS2 was worth the money, his price point was different, and the results were different.

No doubt people will argue that a computer into a HIFI sounds better than a CDS2, and thats there own axe, but bullshit basically.

I suspect, that like me he will feel that the quality offered by the computer route simply is not up to scratch, I know how I am sounding but its a fact really, I think this is something you could measure, I am not on about personal feelings here, just bog standard, run of the mill facts. Once that digital information has finally hit the speakers its been through a whole lot more than a CD, its been compressed, imported (gone through the mill of a cheap CDRom drive) ****ed with by various software and tagged with musical info and album art cover info, its then been pumped through the cheap software of windows or Mac into a even further compressed and normally amplified mess into the outputs card which has ****ed with it some more before it even has a chance with the dac, seriously someone tell me I am wrong!

Its not a route I will soon revisit, It was fun playing with new kit (from a naim owning perspective it is restrictive I won't argue that) but it did not come up to scratch. Merlin bought around a DAC64 that did sound superb, to be fair I only heard it for ten minutes so a really fair comparison was not sought, but really this is an expensive DAC, and its only the middle part of a long line of shit you have to go through to start to approach the quality a reasonably priced CD player will produce.

For your info through my experiments I did use a DVD player which sounded more promising than the computer DAC combo.

Anyway I don't know why I am getting so passionate about this, do what you want its only a bit 'o' fun.

 

Gary, you are wrong

• With the music in FLAC format on my machine it has never been musically compressed (being a lossless compression), tagged etc.
• The cheap CDRom drive is the same as is used in probably all modern CD players as that is all that is available to manufacturers.
• The software that I use to play these may be more expensive than the software used in any CD player, not that cost has anything to do with it.
• The digital stream won't have been messed with by the soundcard in any different manner to a CD player to get the digital out.
• Only the analogue out will have been messed with, and then in a very similar or identical way to a CD player.

If you were to mention things like RFI, EMF and other PSU related noise, or how it actually isn't as convienient as just sticking a cd into a player I might agree though.

 

I'm not really coming from a audio quality angle, I'm just saying that a high-end CD player will still look purposeful after ten years whilst a 10 year old PC will just look an embarrasing yellowing piece of junk, full of dust and fluff. Not cool at all!

Media/entertainment based PC's will be changing radically in the next year or so and the realms of hifi and PC tech will merge more. I think we just need more collaboration between the two to provide better designed kit for the purpose. Its all a bit Heath-Robinson at the moment.

 

puma,
what i'm trying to say is that music serving is not an arduous task. therefore with judicious use of a duster and a hoover a pc that is a few years old will be just as suitable for THAT task now as it will be in a few years time.

gary,
if i've bought a cds2 for 5k when new and could sell it for 3k now. then invest 1.5k in pc audio and get substantially the same or better quality i'd call that worth doing. i'd be able to get 1.5k's worth of new music or go on holiday.
as for your other points, well lee has adressed them sufficiently i feel.
cheers


julian

 

At heart this is part of what bothers me about the whole computer thing. It's on a seemingly never-ending faster/bigger/cheaper thrill ride. It's all throw-away. What drives the PC business seems to be gaming - it's a long time since most business (accounting, word processing, engineering calculations) needed anything like state-of-the-art. Take a look at what percentage of your hard drive is taken up by your data as against the software "needed" to handle it. Audio/video/photography are special cases needing lots of storage - maybe they're better handled by specialised hardware (and its software).

One element that's missing (and I think it's a contrast to "big iron" audio kit) is robustness. You can buy cheap/big hard drives, but there doesn't seem to be a pitch of "this hardware won't break, or if it does we'll take care of you". Or maybe there is, but the price puts you back to a level where Levinson/Krell/ARC are price competitors.

I'd certainly feel that if I were to go to the trouble of copying all of my CDs/records to a PC hard drive then I'd need to keep them as backup because the drive will fail sooner or later.

 

dick,
the acronym RAID stands for Redundant Array of INEXPENSIVE Drives. a simple 2x 250gb raid would cost a few hundred quid and provide protection against drive failure. a lot of motherboards now provide built in raid and if not a sata raid pci card costs about 30 quid. i've not bothered with a raid on my setup but i may at a later date when i can get 2x 1Tb drives for a few quid and be done with it.

as with most electronics there is a shelf life however due to the nature of the beast a broken mobo will be an inconvienience and a small expense whereas a broken krell or levinson will mean big money. i know which i'd go for - and indeed have.

as for keepiing your cd's as a backup - well you should anyway to prove you've paid for the right to listen to them.

the bottom line is that even if your entire pc vanished in a puff of smoke it would cost a few huindred quid to replace it and a bit of time to re-rip the cd's if you had no backups whereas if your krell went kaput you'd be stuck for a few grand to replace it.
cheers


julian.

 

Seagate offer a 5year warranty on their drives. Hard discs are much more robust now than ever before - unless you drop one of course

 

I guess that one of the things that's puzzling me is the discrepancy between the devices described in the Enterprise pages of PCPro (e.g. HP Proliant DL100 Storage Server - £2868 for 1Tb) and the consumer hardware (£100 for 250Gb).

Buying multiples and the bits to glue the latter together into RAID still seems to leave a fairly large price differential. Are the "enterprise" customers getting ripped off by the "enterprise" suppliers (in the same way that CD player customers are ripped off by audio manufacturers putting £25 drives at the heart of their multi-hundred players)?

 

No. Enterprise disc drives are very differant to consemer disc drives. Enterprise equals better interfaces, better technology, better reliability and better scalability.

Apples versus Oranges.

 

Update

Spent a pleasant afternoon listening to my squeezebox and CDS2. The Squeezebox is still without a DAC but the streaming issues have been resolved and there are no breaks in transmission.

So, the outcome.

• Bass. Yes lots of it, a little more than the CDS2
• Detail. A bit odd this one. In some places more than the CDS2 and in others less. Over all the CD player wins out as the mid seems a little to grainy and "smothered"
• Soundstage The SB has one, the CDS2 doesn't
• Timing Yes, of course the CDS2 does the best timing but the Squeezebox isn't a slouch here either. It seems to drop detail rather than rhythm. Tricky cymbal work remains intact.
• Musicality Obviously the CDS2 is far more musical, presenting a more complete sonic picture as well as offering a more fluid interpretation. The squeezebox does come across as a bit too hi-fi and less musical as well as being hampered by a grainy, boxed in texture.

So what do I do next? I am fairly certain that the graininess and "hi-fi" sound are from the lack of DAC. So the answer has to be to put a decent DAC into the mix and release the full potential of the Squeezebox. That will probably mean selling the CDS2 which I'd rather not do but I need to realise some capital. The thing is that the two boxes are actually quite close in performance and my guess is that with a decent (or even cheap) DAC the SB will happily outperform the CD player.

 

tom,
a couple of things.
1) what was the cause of your streaming breaks and how did you solve them?

2) check that you have set up the digital volume correctly. you need to turn it right up to 40 BEFORE you disable it. if you just disable it, chances are it will be stuck at the mid range '20 out of 40' position and you will be losing detail.

one thing i firmly believe is that the squeezebox - especially it's analog outputs - suffers due to a weedy power supply. try to look at some dacs with hefty psu's again i'd recommend the audio synthesis dacs - talk to david heaton at a/s, a daxc 2 will cost arround 500 quid refurbished with a 1 yr garuantee depending on the spec.
cheers


julian

 

1) Too many large progrqammes demanding first call on the processor. I changed the setting for background running which sorted most of the drops. They still occur but only when large downloads are coming in

2) Volume is at max and matched to the CD & TT

3) Reripping CDs using EAC rather rather Roxio seems to bring better sounding results (subjective)

4) SWMBA decided I need to buy DAC before selling CDS2 "just in case" but won't tell me where the money's coming from

 

Tom if you know anyone who is handy with dacs I have an arcam one you are welcome to for nothing, it might give you an idea of what to expect.

Thing is its not working, the whole unit seems to be in pristine condition, but won't light up,

 

sounds like a PSU problem or even a simple internal cable not connected properly.

 

If you are using XP and the machine isnt connecting to the internet you might want to try shutting down as many services running on the machine as possible so the CPU has an easier time -

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

Gives one of the classic performance setups for a few differeing types of application.

May be worth a try and for any of you running a vanilla XP setup it may be worth a look too.

 

Gary

That's a very kind offer but as I live in the middle of nowhere I don't have access to anyone who's likely to know what to do with a broken DAC.

Nay bother, something will turn up soon DV

 

Tom,

I reckon a Michaelab style 'NOS' DAC might work well with a Naim amp, it would give the signal conditioning in the preamp some work to do. Very cheap and fashionable too.

Failing that 'Linn Numerik' again. Unfashionable and so cheap. Loads of power supplies inside and a pretty good clock.

Garyi, if you're prepared to post I'll have your Arcam. If it's repairable we could split any proceeds.

Paul

 

Paul if you can email me at garethsnaim at yahoo dot co dot uk

Sounds cool. I don't know anything about electronics but it dosn't appear to be the type of thing that would suffer dry joints, but it was sent through the post to an ebay winner who wasn't best pleased, so I had to refund him, it worked perfectly before I sent it.

I check inside and changed the board fuse and tried a different lead but unfortunately thats the extent of my Knowledge!

 

A little bit more. The timing is spot on, the musical flow is less, the convenience is amazing and all in all it sounds a bit like a CDX or CD3.5 depending on the track. CDS2 is definitely better but not enough to worry about.

Garyi, you are right, I am very happy with my CDS2 and the change of medium must come at the quality. Fortunately from what I've heard so far I think I will actually improve on what I've got.

I'm beginning to consider DACs seriously including the Linn Numerik, audio synthesis daxc 2, Arcam, Benchmark Media DAC1, Scott Nixon, Rega Io and Cyrus DAX X / PSU. I feel that a decent power supply is important so I may veer away from those with switchmode.

Any thoughts?