1. it's really not expensive to make your pc very-quiet. it can be very pricy to make your pc silent (not necessarily - see next point). by "very-quiet" i mean for examply my system which i can't hear unless i put my head under the desk

2. you can make your pc completely passively cooled. most economical way is to use a mobile processor such as mobile athlonxp, a big heat sink seated well with arctic silver, a fanless mobo, no case fans, a fanless psu, a well ventalated case, and underclocking your mobo

3. seagate and samsung are really your only choices for quiet hd's. samsung seems to take the "best" designation right now in quiet hd's. we're talking 3.5mm desktop drives by the way. laptop drives are quieter and more $$

4. mount your hd and any other fans with rubber washers to prevent noise transfer to the case. or suspend with elastic

5. pc audio rocks

6. set up foobar and eac with hydrogenaudio's guides, configure eac with key disks and you'll be in business

7. the emu 0404 (and 1212m of course) is absolutely incredible for the price, ESPECIALLY when modded: output buffers and caps removed and bridged, opamp changed to something like ad8620, 8066, LT..... or many other options. blew my nad521i out of the water when unmodded.

8. yes, digital-signal carrying cables (optical and coaxial) really do make a difference

9. a "DAC" is a digital to audio converter. in pc-hifi we speak of "external dac". the idea is that you have a digital cable connection between either: a mobo that has spdif out, or a sound card. that connects to your dac. your dac outputs an analog "line out" unamplified signal. that signal is then sent to your amp via analog cables (rca is general), and is then the signal is (duh) "amplified!" dacs are the hi-end way to play redbook audio (cd) from your pc. the more recognized and glorified ones are in thte $1k range, but there are some $500 and under ones that recieve high acclaim: ciaudio, aos piccolo and flute, scott nixon's versions esp. the tubedac, ack dac etc.

10. power conditioning is WORTHY

please add your own "general good-to-know pc info"

DACs to the people!

Good thing you edited dacs into your first post.

Quote:



Exactly.
As far as Redbook audio is concerned traditional gear is technically inferior ( at least if you are looking for bang-for-the-buck) and outdated.
Admittedly conceptually antiquated gear is more "plug-and-play" convenient, but you have to invest only a few hours for learning how to set up, rip, grab,store, play and maintain computer audio and you are in the 21st century.
Quote:



That's risky.Last year two Samsung HDs died here most probably due to a silenced and unproperly cooled PC.Harddiscs need ventilation.
Quote:



Modern resampling/reclocking DACs are at least less sensitive to cable quality.
Quote:



DACs in the $1k range like Benchmark, Apogee, AQVOX, BelCanto DAC2 are asynchronous resampling/recklocking DACs.
In the $500 range you get usually DACs simply slaved to the transport, and therefor you won't get away with a cheap source like AV-710 and a cheap cable.
In the end the required low-jitter transport and the high quality cable will catapult you into the $1k range anyway. Quote:



Not really IME.
Really good audio gear is already "power conditioned", that's the difference between a mediocre and a good PS.
Ultraclean battery power is a whole separate question.

Quote:



Caps are better than opamps

Quote:



But for most gear people can afford, this is not the case. I do not know where really good audio gear starts... $3000?

Here's a question: Buy the Benchmark DAC1 (fed by my laptop) or build a dedicated music PC (with a EMU or RME card) for approximately the same money?

This is for a second system with speakers. The idea is that I won't have to duplicate CDs for use away from my main rig. The question comes down to how the DAC1 compares to the analog out from the EMU and RME cards, but convenience is also a factor: the dedicated PC can hold me audio, etc.

Quote:



well, there areent' a ton of folks who have used both, but there are some. general concencus i've gathered is tha the benchmark is a significant increase in quality. with lots of modding it could be close, i suppose: i actually wonder whether the benchmark would beat irondreamer's 1212m? for extra storage you can always get an external samsung hd. i really don't see the whole "dedicated music pc" argument if you've got a top.

so, i say: if you've got the laptop (and it's not NOISY), stick with it. get yourself as big a hd as you need and put it in external case. i'd put whatever bitrate of music you can on your laptop's hd: mp3 whatever, so that you have that in transit (or you can alway lug an external drive about ), then put everything on flac on the external drive.

Good point -- my Inspiron 8600 laptop is extremely quiet by desktop PC standards. With an external drive, M-Audio Transit, and DAC1, I should be in great shape. The downside is that this setup with be around $1500 all in, versus less for a dedicated PC.

An Apogee Mini-DAC with USB provides excellent sound using the laptop's internal cd player or lossless files on hd. Less than $1500 too..... 8~)

PC noise doesn't seem to be a factor since I'm passing bits through a USB cable. I more often use a PCDP as a transport, but USB out from my main PC (mid-level ASUS mobo, std 350w ps and Lite-On drive) and Foobar with Apogee ASIO driver is completely silent. And, very excellent sounding.

FWIW

Hi,

I am using Maxstor in my jukebox build. Things have been delayed due to a faulty remote sensor. A replacement is on it's way.

I have a Sky Plus box which is a bit like a TIVO and have replaced the drive with a larger 160gb Maxstor unit. As part of the help from Sky + forums, I first connected the drive to a PC and used Maxstor utilities downloaded from their web site.
A menu option is to set the drive in quiet mode, which is reccomended for the PVR, which I dutifully carried out. The drive is now very quiet and cannot be heard. I also turned off write verify.

I've done the same thing to a new 200gb Maxstor for my jukebox, but have left on write verify. Does anyone know what this does and the disadvantages of having it turned off?

I guess performance will suffer a little, but my objective is to use the jukebox purely for music and video, with menus displayed on a standard def. TV.

Hope this is of interest.

Regards

John

as far as power conditioning and digital-cables i think there is a mass of ignorance on headfi, myself included. few folks such as lan and others have actually experimented with power conditiioning for these devices, and many who have never heard different digital cables will claim "it makes no difference" none the less.

2. you can make your pc completely passively cooled. most economical way is to use a mobile processor such as mobile athlonxp, a big heat sink seated well with arctic silver, a fanless mobo, no case fans, a fanless psu, a well ventalated case, and underclocking your mobo

THis is highy impractical... so is water cooling imho. THe seasonic tonado ps are incredibly quiet.. in addition to a 90mm Nexus fan cooling my athlon mobile 2500+ my pc is quieter then my flourscent lights from < .5 meters away and beyond that inaudible. Reading forum experiences of passively cooled ps have made me come to the conclusion that they are counterproductive to silencing pc's. That's internal ps's mind u.. external ps's (which are not for sale yet outside of kits) i can see as useful but not really necessary when u consider the quietness and price of the seasonic.

3. seagate and samsung are really your only choices for quiet hd's. samsung seems to take the "best" designation right now in quiet hd's. we're talking 3.5mm desktop drives by the way. laptop drives are quieter and more $$

I don't care how quiet the hd's are, they are still too loud or too expensive. Best solution is to have a cheap hd server in another room filled with cheap big hd's for your 10,000+ song collection.

6. set up foobar and eac with hydrogenaudio's guides, configure eac with key disks and you'll be in business

Given that RME digi96 (and apparently EMU's too) natively bypass the kmixer, i don't think it's really important what media player u use if u use these cards.

10. power conditioning is WORTHY

Yes it is on audio equipment, but other than keeping ur pc from crashing due to power spikes i don't think it has any affect on audio if u use an external dac.

well...............ok............

as far as EAC, i think it does matter over using rippers that do not create accurate copies. as far as foobar, yeah, it's more personal choice, though it does give some nice options for tweaking playback

anyway: you seem hell bent on disagreeing with ever point. that's not terribly constructive.

ps: i'm pretty sure you're wrong about those cards bypassing kmixer. though winamp has ASIO support as well, so that's fine. foobar isn't overwhelmingly better than winamp, but it does give more options for tweaking on the audiophile level IMO

Quote:



As far as digital cables are concerned (I'm only talking about coax as I know more about them)... I disagree with your point about needing to hear different digital cables to know if they make an audible difference, (sort of). I am in my final quarter of college and will be graduating in June with a BS in Electrical Engineering. I understand things like bandwidth, capacitance, inductance very well etc (as I'm sure others here do as well). By simply knowing the specs of a cable and the specs of the SPDIF format (or sending a DD or DTS stream) I could tell you weather a cable will be essentially perfect or much less than perfect or anything in between (I know most cable manufactures probably do not publish specs so that's where the sort of comes from). This is true because we’re talking about digital, analogue is a much different subject. Based on the specs we can predict how well the receiving end will be able to reconstruct the intended signal.

This paragraph is just general information to anyone interested who might not know as much about the topic. In a digital signal, it doesn't matter how bad the signal degrades in its transmission, all that matters is if the receiver can decipher the intended signal. From what I understand in a SPDIF to DAC situation there are two things that can be a problem for sound quality, data errors, (a 1 being interpreted as a 0 and vise versa), and jitter (the raise or fall of the signal not happening exactly when its supposed to happen). In most audio situations we're talking about, data errors are not a problem. You will usually hear a pop, click, or dropout if you have one that is not fixed by error correction methods. That leaves the only culprit jitter. Jitter is important because the DAC uses the SPDIF signal as a clock. If signal raises are a little early or late, the DAC can make digital to analogue conversions a little early or a little late, smearing the sound. This can be helped by buffering a little at the DAC as cosmopragma pointed out. On with my post…

I have not looked into the specs of cables sold at the average store so the rest of this I admit is speculation. I find it VERY hard to believe that you could ABX the difference between any coax cable of your choosing and a $30 one I pick up at Best Buy. For sending data over short distances the requirements of the SPDIF signal are not approaching the limits of a simple yet properly designed coax cable. No special design or special metals are needed.

(I very well might be wrong about the SPDIF signal below, I didn't look this up, just a somewhat educated guess. Also I realize that other higher sample rates can be sent, but most often we're talking about CD sound, it's just for illustration purposes anyways)

A SPDIF signal: 32 bits * 44.1 k *2 ch = 2.8 Mbps. Even if SPIDIF uses (I forget the term but basically its a way to transmit a serial digital signal where you send two square waves per bit, its not efficient but its a good way to send the clock with the signal) then it's still only 5.6 ish Mbps signal. Coax cables in the lengths were worried about (if I remember correctly) usually have a bandwidth in the 100 MHz range, probably higher, maybe lots higher. As long as the capacitance and inductance are in check, such high extra bandwidth makes things like signal raise time not a problem. It doesn’t take much design effort or special materials to do those things, then impedance mach it, and jitter due to the cable will be very small.

Basically it is quite cheep and easy to design a cable to meet requirements of a SPDIF signal and transmit it over short distances VERY accurately. It simply is not a very demanding signal to transmit over short distances. Simple cables can do it very well. It is very hard for me to believe that most companies have not gotten it right with inexpensive cables.

The audio world has more snake oil sales pitches than any other place in society in my experience. I would say that this is due to a few factors, but one of them being the power or the placebo. People can think they can hear a difference, even be quite strongly convinced they can hear a difference, and not really hear a difference.

P.S. I’m not saying that the more expensive cables do not transmit the signal “better,” (it would be very morally concerning to me if they didn’t) it’s just that the room for improvement is SO small, a human should not be able to hear the difference.

that was a very interesting and well articulated post. thanks for your input

Quote:



Sorry about that.. i'm just sick and cranky...