Whats the best option here?

Yep, you read it right, I am looking at returning back to hifi.

I sold my exposure stereo amp to go for home cinema in the hope that I could tolerate the quality, and I changed my room around so I could fit all of this gear in more comfortably. The way the room is laid out is how I like it now... however, the one thing I was using as my main source, my PC is now nowhere near the rest of the kit.

I have been using my DVD player into the optical input of the Yamaha amp to play CDs through the speakers.

Unfortunately after a few weeks of this, my opinion is that for music, the sound is quite poor. Its nowhere near as good as my old Rotel RA-01 / EMU 0404 / Rega Ela, and its nowhere near as good as my old Exposure 20 / EMU 0404 / Mordaunt Short MS10i system, despite using the same speakers.

OK, I am not using a sub, but nevertheless, I find the bass a bit poor and the sound lacks involvement and is boring to listen to. The detail is quite poor as well. At first I felt I was happy with it, but it did not stand the test of time.

For TV and movie viewing, the sound is perfectly acceptable, if perhaps just slightly lacking at the bottom end.

So... I am currently looking at an amp, and have seen one for sale that will be a worthy replacement for the Exposure, and am going to go for it. I will link the pre-outs for the front speakers from the Yamaha into an input on the stereo amp and will use the Yamaha amp controls to match the volume levels of the speakers.

However, that leaves the source. As it stands, I very much doubt a £40 DVD player will really cut the mustard.

So, I have a number of options here, and I want to know what you think will be the best option.

My budget is quite limited, say around £200 at the most.

The first option is a dedicated CD player. The thing that puts me off this idea is I am used to this whole MP3 / computer audio stuff, so it would seem like too much of a retrograde step having to go back to CDs after the convenience.

I could link the PC directly up as I used to, but I believe I would have to move the room around again and thats not really an option because I like it how it is now.

The second option is a sort of halfway house between the convenience of a computer with the ability to play MP3 would be to hook up a DAC to the DVD player. I was thinking something along the lines of a Behringer DEQ2496 because I have heard it actually has a very respectable DAC, but also gives me the flexibility to add some bass to movies if it was needed.... although I suspect a sub will still be the way forward here, and I am hoping that maybe the stereo amp on its own will give more bass power to the front speakers.

The third option is a squeezebox. Again because of how my room is laid out I'd likely go for the wireless version. Again I've heard that the sound quality of one of these actually isnt too bad. Of course, the option of adding a DAC to that later is also there.

So....... if you were me, which would you go for and why?

 

I've gone down the same road as you and gave up. Now I keep my music system completely seperate from the HT. Ive even tried taking the digital output from my AV receiver and put it into my dac and hifi music system for a 2 channel tv system and even that was poor, Wife says the dialogue was much clearer tho. Playing music through the Ht is dreadful even with my HIFI speakes doing the front L and R with their usual monoblocs. It just sounds dreadful. I hope you find a solution. I gave up in the end and now my music is completely separate.

 

What I was going to do was use the pre-out from the yammy into the stereo amp, and then have that set at 12 o clock and then use the yammy amp controls to make sure the volumes are matched.

Then, I was going to keep all 2 channel sources completely seperate, so in effect, having a DAC / CD player / whatever source plugged straight into the stereo amp and switch when needed. This is the only solution I can think of that would have a satisfactory effect, and I see no reason why it shouldnt work.

 

Did you ever have a listen to the active Alesis monitors?

 

No, but I'm not listening nearfield now.

 

The DEQ isn't that great as a DAC... the superDAC and nosdac are quite a bit better.

I'd be inclined to think that your tastes/needs would be best served by the squeezebox.

 

Well you know I like the DEQ. In stock form the DEQ's DAC is not brilliant. But it certainly isn't bad.

I guess you can get a SuperDAC now and be done with it or get a DEQ and have the room correction and the ability to mod it later to far higher standards.

My own experience would suggest that the room correction is worth having over a slightly better DAC and you can mod it later for about £300 to extreamly high standards.

 

I use a similar set up to what you seem to describe.

Stereo amp with sources plugged directly into it. (DVD player into DAC)

Yamaha AV amp with front pre outs connected to stereo amp, and dvd player plugged straight into that.

However, I use the E800 rather than a full blown AV amp.

I'd go for the squeezebox (or alternative???), route if I was you.

However, not sure why you can't still connect your soundcard straight to the amp?

 

I'd go for the Squeezebox, it gives you the MP3 playback you want and sounds pretty good as is and you can always add a DAC at a later date.

Try and keep an eye out for a Squeezebox 2 if you can as it will be within budget and they are the same inside.

If you only listen to MP3's and not FLAC etc. the Noxon 2 might also be worth a look:
http://www.my-noxon.com/noxon.html

 

Thanks for the thoughts guys....

I've followed this thread and i've got the same one going at the other place... i'm sort of torn at the moment between a NOS DAC on the DVD player or the SB.... however, the problem with the NOS DAC is i'll have to keep going into the menu and switching the output from DD to PCM, which aint the end of the world, but still a little inconvenient. The Squeezebox option is looking attractive for the convenience factor.

MO, the reason I cant connect the PC is because of location. I have the PC in a wardrobe, and the analogue interconnect would have to stretch approx 10m (perhaps more) to get to where the amp is. Surely that couldnt be good for sound quality? And it would be messy. I could move the PC, but that would mess up the way I've set the room up.

Andrew, so the SB2 is just the same as the SB3? Might be able to get one of those second hand in that case.

 

Yes, cosmetic changes, a second internal aerial and a very slight change to the power supply board are the only differences.

You could also look into a wired model and use a 10m network cable to keep the price down.

 

Cheers Andrew, guess that may be worth looking into...

Right, I can reveal the stereo amp that is to fill the boots of the Exposure... its this:-

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ONIX-OA20-amp...oryZ3280QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Listed as an Onix OA20 however it appears like it might have been listed wrong and is actually an Onix OA21

 

Threre isn't too much wrong with a 10m interconnect.

 

Well i would consider doing it if i thought it wouldnt be too bad... certainly be a lot cheaper, and i was never dissatisfied with the sound of the EMU.

Although I'd certainly check first to see if I got hiss / buzz through the amp, because that was certainly a problem with the exposure.

 

Well, a 10meter interconnect doesn't cost much as an experiment. Don't run it past many mains cables and use a nicely shielded cable from maplin. That blue 'Shark' stuff is very well shielded. Should be fine. I have a very long unbalanced cable running from the cable TV box downstairs out the wall and up the side of the house then in to my room and across it. It sounds great!

Remember many people use long cables to power-amps near the speakers.

 

Thats a good idea, and will save me a few quid if it works out, thanks for that

I'd just assumed (wrongly by the look of it) that such a cable would audibly degrade the signal.

 

You can but try! It will largely depend on how well the soundcard can drive the cable I suspect.

 

Hi P,

Perhaps it might help if I tell you a few lines from where I'm at.

I first got into "Home Cinema" in the pre DVD Age. This meant a top of the range Sony VCR (DVD was on the horizon, so I elected NOT to go Laserdisk), a 32" Sony TV, a well reviewed Kenwood receiver, I kept my Sony ES series vintage, square aluminum honeycomb woofer monitors (the big ones) as fronts, added a pair of Canon's semi omni reflective speakers (excellent rears for DPL) and a overachieving Radio Shack Center speaker with a Linaeum Tweeter.

In stereo mode the Kenwood Receiver lost out big to my old silver fronted Technics Class AA integrated Amp (actually, it used slap Naim Nait's sill around the workshop at MVE at Notting Hill Gate (On JBL 4401 Monitors). The surround sound on movies just did not work for me at all.

I found the occasional effect from the rear when everything happened in front on the screen disconcerting, the pans extremely abrupt and lacking smoothness and just generally often switched back to 2+1-Channel. In the cinema the room and screen are so hugely bigger it is less an issue but even there it often distracts to me personally from the movies than it adds and again, even in such huge spaces and with all the discrete channels they could wish for (Leicester Square Odeon) pans are to obvious and abrupt.

Within a year or two I modded the heck out of the Kenwood receiver (which made it better than my old Technics), then got a Maratz CD-67SE & PM-66SE (in short order also modified) and reverted to stereo, using the TV's build in speakers at much less level than a center would have to anchor the sound to the screen.

I have been using variations of this for the better part of the last decade.

My current Home Cinema is as follows:

Source:

Windows Media Center PC, homebuild, Silverstone LC-11M case in silver, Intel Pentium P4 3GHz, 1GB RAM, 300GB Media Drive and 80GB System Drive, Hauppauge Digital TV Cards X 2, ATI Radeon Graphics card with "direct TV" RGB output from the VGA (needs special drivers and cables but gives the best possible picture), interlaced, Windows XP-Media Center with NVIDIA DVD-Decoder software set to disable deinterlacing and CCCP decoder pack. Music via Winamp and ADIO4ALL (in preference to foobar, which sounds no better but sucks for user interface).

Audio is direct from the off board codec to the TV and via the optical output and a Behringer DEQ2496 operated mainly as DAC with the addition of the THX "X-Curve".

What this does is basically everything AV. It is a Tivo/Sky+ for Freeview, except with much better usability, DVD Player (and copier/recorder), MP3/FLAC based Music Box, streaming (Net) media receiver, picture repository (digital Photos for the endlessly boring slideshows).

What it currently does not do is the main "quality" music source, all else that is AV in some form runs on this frontend, music will join as soon as I have the final prototype of my new CD Player here (it has a USB input for external digital that is as good as the build in drive).

Picture:

Sony 44" CRT Rear Projection TV, I got this after trying to find a sub £ 2,000 Plasma or LCD TV that had natural colours and decent contrast and was reasonably free from visible digital processing artifacts. Thanks to auto-convergence (needed quite often though) it is just great. It's not HD, but I'll wait another year or two until HD Programing is enough to worry and by then the £ 900 I paid will be well amortised.

Sound:

Same as my music sound system, except for the use of the TV's build in sound as "partial center". That sound system is as follows:

Speakers are prototypes of the 3D Sonics Transparence, now up to "SE" status (SE is as of yet unreleased), that is with fieldcoil drivers and supertweeters, sub is also my own design using a pair of 12" Pro Audio drivers using the URPS design (Under Resonance Principle Subwoofer) crossed over around 50Hz, the system efficiency is around 98db/W/m.

Amplifiers are early generation Shanling SP-80's with bypassed/removed preamp section and triode wired and with decent Valves and coupling capacitors (no other mods - cobblers kids syndrome). Cables are also 3D Sonics, prototypes actually.

Preamp is a copper Music First Passive Magnetic Preamp.

Music Sources are an extremely heavily modded first generation Pioneer DVD Player (which ironically has not been used to play DVD's in ages but which is a top notch Audio Player, as good or better than the Eikos) which as it so happens reads the CD asynchronous with multiple reads before it resorts to normal error correction methods and LP via the "three-armed bandit" turntable (Acoustic Solid "Solid One" with three Arms) and my own design of Phonostage using RLC equalisation.

This system is superb with both film and music programs on DVD and also rather good (to my taste) with music, even using the Media Center PC as source, actually, though my (DVD based) CDP is better as source.

Ciao T

 

what was the question again?

 

Thats a very nice system... but waaaaaaaaaaay out of my league :lol: