pc based juke box

Hi Everyone, happy new year to all.

I have really enjoyed the recent Let's get digital thread and am very tempted to investigate this approach further. I have a spare PC that would be perfect for this task once I get some big HDDs for it. Like Tom A., I'm contemplating a CDP upgrade, although admittedly not quite to the CDS3 level . The idea of a PC music server seems like a plausible alternative.

The consensus on the above thread turned out to be using a Squeezebox as the interface between the PC and the traditional audio system, with the possibility of a separate DAC to refine the SB's limited analog output.

Has anyone investigated other devices that duplicate the SB function?

I found a PC Mag review that compares various devices (they call them "media hubs" in the article), albeit from the perspective of a PC magazine and not that of an audiophile.

My current preference would be to get one that definitely handles lossless data. I notice the PC Mag choice was a Turtle Beach Audiotron which only supports WAV as its lossless format. Unlike the SB which supports WAV and FLAC. Julian2002 seemed very much in favor of the FLAC format for a couple of reasons. Is the lack of FLAC support significant if considering the Audiotron?

Has anyone found any other good sources for info on these "media hubs", preferably from a hi-fi perspective?

Good info on DAC's would also be useful if anyone has sources.

FWIW, my system is mostly (entry level) Naim, CD3, NAT03, NAC92R, NAP90.3 into Kef 105.

-Peter

 

hi plz and welcome,
flac is a compressed lossless format. that means that a song will take up roughly half the space on your hard drive that an uncompressed wav will take. lossless means there is no loss of quality between the compressed file and the original. think of it as winzip for music. when you unzip a file the files inside are uncompressed exactly as they were otherwise they wouldn;t work (either as data or as programmes). flac is the same sort of thing but optimised for music files.
this only really matters if you are concerned about hdd space. if you don;t mind buying twice as many hdd's or only having half as many songs on your system then using wav's is possible.
the other thing to watch out for is that the audiotron only has optical digital output which are usually of lesser quality than coax or xlr digital outs.
i looked at quite a few network media players and went for the squeezebox as it ticked every box - flac, coax digi out, display on board, remote control, internet radio streaming, low server power reqirements, etc. it's a little more expensive than most but if you go for the wired version it's not too bad.
cheers


julian

 

Have to agree and say the 'Lets get digital' thread has been one of the best this year. Very interesting indeed.

 

Anyone looked at the D-Link DSM-320 Wireless Media Player, cheaper than a Squeezebox but comes with a full remote?

Any thoughts?

http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=318#


Mr Perceptive

 

mr perceptive,
it looks ok but i'd have rejected it as it's got video abilities as well. usually if this is the case they cut costs and you have to connect up to a tv to see what you are doing - this seems to be the case with the d-link. also there needs to be a lot of extra hardware internally to cope with video so there will probably have been some compromises or interference from the video stuff which (rightly or wrongly) offends my audiophool sensibilities. ymmv of course
cheers


julian

 

Have you considered the Netgear MP101 http://www.netgear.co.uk/netgear_mp101_digitalmusic.php
or Creative Wireless music player http://www.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=243&subcategory=247&product=9192

Both are cheaper than the squeezebox, the netgear lacks a digital out but the creative has an optical out.

I have just finished copying all of my CD's for use with the netgear and have been very impressed with it, I can just leave it on shuffle and let it run.

I have found that a standard PC was too loud for leaving on constantly but had a spare mini-pc which I have replaced the original fans and this is near silent which I prefer as I don't use this PC so just leave it switched on in the background.

Andrew

 

You could buy an old laptop run linux on it and store all the MP3s on that. While you're at it you could configure this up as a file server so others PCs around the house can access the files. Or if you have a high bandwidth account and don't mind going to prison setup a web server and make the directory that contains the MP3s the home directory.

 

Andrew

A brief look at the specs suggests only the Squeezebox and D-Link will do uncompressed audio, I may be wrong here, but I couldn't see a mention of WAV files

Julian

I agree Video will offend the audiophile, but given that currently 95% of my families entertainment comes from DVD/TV rather than CD/Radio compromises have to be made!

Mr Perceptive

 

I have been watching this and the "let's get digital" thread with interest.

Good to see that the music server concept is flowing over to the Audiophile forums. Personally, I will be looking from the sidelines for a good while yet.

We built a new house 2 years ago and made sure the electrician tracked in extra cabling conduits from each room into the loft space that can be cabled at a later time.

Ideally, I want to end up with a setup that uses a central music server located in the loft feeding a high quality DAC and preamp with balanced XLR outputs. Would use balanced connections to feeds active speaker systems in listening rooms of the house (balanced connections, so long cable runs still OK). All that would be seen in the listening room is the speakers and handset remote control with integrated digital display controlling the server and preamp (volume control). Not sure if anyone is making this type of system yet though but I know even the wife would luv it!

 

Yes, my apologies, I was thinking of streaming compressed files.

The netgear definitely doesn't and I don't think the creative will

Andrew

 

i guess everyone has their own priorities. the squeezebox seemed to be the most focussed option available for me - even if it isn;t the most aesthetic or cheapest. it can decode pretty much any format out there and isn't trying to do everything. the other big plus for me is that it is all open source, even the hardware has a 'geek connector' so you can hook up various 'projects' to it if you are so inclined.
the biggest minus point for me is the lack of 'visualisations' - pretty swirly colours on the display or a partnered tv screen which would be nice but then you can always get one of those coloured oil projectors from mathmos for a few quid.

the roku sound bridge is perhaps the next best thing although it is more expensive as basically a squeezebox in drag - and it can do uncompressed too.
cheers


julian

 

Also the ruku can work with itunes, if you already have a large collection in itunes it might tip the balance for you.

 

Wow, this is certainly a hot topic. I wonder if any of the hi-fi companies are working on their own versions of a solution for this new "market"? And if so, where would they focus their efforts? Seems to me that a natural place for a company like Naim would be to work on a stand alone DAC for sale to the public?

Let me summarize what I think the issues are for a PC based music server scenario:

1. All music stored on a PC's HDD. The PC can be low performance as music streaming is not too compute or memory intensive.

2. The PC can easily be located in an out of the way location (ie. a room other than the audio system is in) as long as it can be networked to the interface device ("media hub" in the PC Mag article I originally posted a link to). The PC only needs to have sufficient disk space to store the music data you want. Isolating the PC in a separate room isolates the hi-fi system from excessive noise due to the PC's fans, HDDs etc. I assume the "noise" we're talking about is ambient noise and not line noise in the electrical signal, correct?

3. Since the effort to convert the music from CD to HD data files is significant, to not have that data backed up (in digital file format) is foolish.

4. To provide the most flexibility for the future, and to ensure the same data as on the original source CD, the data should be stored on the HDD in a lossless format. Compression is up to the user, but the key is to have all the data there. WAV will do this but is uncompressed, FLAC will also do it but compresses the data to save disk space. The key is to have all the original data available.

5. A device is needed to receive the data from the music server PC (via a network) and pass it on to the hi-fi system. This device (such as a Squeezebox) merely takes the raw data and does one of two things:

• convert from digital to analog directly, or
• pass the digital data data on to a dedicated high quality DAC for conversion before the hi-fi gets it.

Let's assume the system above also has a dedicated DAC which receives the raw uncompressed digital feed from the Squeezebox.

Let's also use a Naim CDS3 for the sake of illustration. It has a very sophisticated CD transport, all sorts of vibration isolation mechanisms, separate power supplies, etc.

What I'd like to confirm is this:

In the music server scenario above, if all the points are satisfied, is the data received by the dedicated DAC exactly the same as CDS3's internal DAC would receive while playing the same CD. Is this assumption correct?

Or is there something else that a high quality CD player does before passing the digital data from a music CD to its internal DAC?

If the assumption is correct, does this not pose serious problems for makers of high end CD players?

If the assumption is not correct, then what is it that the high end CD transport does that the music server scenario omits?

One further scenario:

If the above assumption is correct, if Naim were to sell their CDS3 DAC as a separate box, would I be correct to expect to get the exact same result at my speakers (and ears!) if everything else in the system downstream of the DAC mechanism (either internal CDS3 or the music server scenario) is also exactly the same?

My hope is that the answer to both assumptions is yes, but perhaps I'm being naive...

Looking toward to some theories on this!

-Peter

 

Peter, if we were to take all your assumptions then hifi would have never have existed because everything would have sounded the same.

We all know that hifi does not sound the same. I sold my naim CDi to fund a harddrive based system. It did not take me too long (but with plenty of fiddling) to realise a fundamental problem, it didn't sound great. Sure it sounded good, but not great.

Of course YMMV.

Another problem, which is inherent I think with the male psyche is one of tinkering, and the major issue I faced with the HD based system was the knowledge that if I wasn't happy I could tinker, be it with the compression, the processor time or the EQ, in short I was not happy but was able to tinker. After a while I tired of this and realised I wasn't listening to music, I was tinkering with it all the while, trying to get that something that got lost between importing the CD and out puting to a dac.

I will no doubt look at it again in the future, but for now I have a harddrive based system going into a dac if I want, but I had to get another CDP because my deck was taking a hammering!

So in short, if you can afford to have a play without sacrificing other elements of your hifi then have a go, you might be blown away. But do not do what I did and sell you hifi to fund your experiment, because all in all I was far from blown away.

 

garyi,

I don't think I'm talking about selling or replacing my system. Quite the contrary, I think I still need most of it. The only thing that is up for consideration is the source. My fundamental question is one of replacing my CDP with a PC based juke box and a high quality DAC to process the raw data.

That's all I'm considering. Not the whole system. And if I could (theoretically speaking) get a DAC that was exactly the same as the DAC in my current CDP, would the result be the same if playing the same source through the CDP or jukebox.

If the result would not be the same, what is the CDP doing that the jukebox is not? Perhaps a naive question but I'm sure someone here can give me some insight.

BTW, I would never sell my CDP to fund the jukebox. I would defintiely want to do a side by side once it was all set up. To do otherwise would not make sense to me.

-Peter

 

Indeed, and in retrospect it makes little sense to me as well lol.

 

have a gander at....

www.digitalfidelity.com

.....all the hard work done for you.

 

Thanks for the link. Unless I missed it though, this solution does not provide the ability to use the DAC of my choice?

That is something I definitely want as it seems to me the DAC is where the value add will be. The raw data is just that, a bunch of bits (isn't it?).

So to get the hi-fi qualities each listener wants (flat, round, whatever), the DAC will be the key (to the source anyway). Plus all the stuff downstream from there (pre-amp, power amp, speakers). But that downstream stuff would be required regardless of what the source is.

BTW, the clock modules that CDPs have, are they part of the DAC or the transport?

-Peter

 

The DAC does seem to be the point of change. I can understand some of Gary's concerns and would be worried if I was using lossy compressed files. But in my case the files are at present compressed using EAC & FLAC to give acurate and lossless storage but given enough disk space I'll probably go back to unadulterated WAV. I'm not interested in the tweaking side of things, although I'm not ruling it out. So assuming that that the original data packet is intact the two questions remain.
1) What is the difference between an HDD stream and that from a CD transport
2) How will a given DAC alter the sound away from the "Naim" sound generated by the CDS3 DAC.

THe answer to 2) is fairly straight forward. It will differ but so do the DACs in te CDS2 & CDS3. I guess there are good DACs out there which will be close in tempremant to the Naim ideal. The thing I've noticed about the Squeezebox is just how Olive Naim it sounds. Mind you it's going through a huge pile of Olive boxes but either the sound is more directly affected by the amps or the SB is shockingly flat earth.

the answer to question 1) is that the two sources are doing different jobs. In the case of the PC, the CD writer reads the information on the disc and error checks it then copies it to the HDD. End of story. It can do this at it's own pace and apply as many checks as it needs. All it is doing is copying the data. When it is time to retrieve a track then it's passed to a different set of software/hardware, presumably using sizeable buffering to ensure smooth passage to the DAC. This is, I guess, what the Squeezebox is in part doing.

The CD transport has to not only read the data acurately in real time but interpret and error correct the resulting signal before passing it on to the DAC. It doesn't have the luxury of multiple pass reads or slowing down the data flow. The transport has to cope with damping out external stimuli that may effect accurate reading (e.g. noise, vibration, external light, variation in disc speed and beam focus), it also has to error check the signal, unpack it etc before passing it to the DAC. Basically it's got it's work cut out to do this accurately and quickly, which a file stored on a HDD doesn't have to struggle with.

One final point, Already there are memory sticks that can hold 1gb or one whole uncompressed album. No moving parts at all. We may get to have sizeable storage drives based on these sticks sometime in the next few years.

 

It's part of the transport.