[jvgig]

I am almost always on my main workstation while listening to music and, needless to say, its a beast with 7 fans and 6 hard drives whirling and buzzing about.  I am thinking of building a dedicated media PC to play ripped blurays and my music library so I can listen in piece when not working.  I am thinking I want to go all passive cooling if possible, but unfortunately I cannot afford enough SSDs for my media collections so I will have to use HDDs.  I will feed a pair of Adam A7x and Sennheiser HD600s from an Asus Xonar STX and have a TV that needs an HDMI input.  Eventually I will be upgrading to something with XLR connections, but as a grad student moving to Atlanta, that wont happen this year.  I will need about 750 GB for music and 4 TB for bluray/DVD rips.  Room to grow would be nice until I can put a file server in a different room (not for at least 5 years) and some form of data redundancy is essential.  
 
Has anyone done such a build or bought a prebuilt system to do such?  
Any suggestions on components or setup to ensure no noise pickup on the audio channels?

 

[cel4145]

Any suggestions on components or setup to ensure no noise pickup on the audio channels?

Instead of going with the STX, an external DAC and headphone amp can decrease the likelihood of that problem.

 

[Golfnutz]

Have you checked out any of the C.A.P.S. v3 configurations at Computer Audiophile? Why not use NAS with a cheap router, in same room/proximity as computer.

 

[MadMogone]

From England, HI, I have just finished building a dedicated music/music DVD media player. It consists of the following components :- ASUS E45m1-deluxe AMD 1.65 Ghz dual core + Radeon 6320 graphics chip ( APU ) mITX motherboard, 4Gbs of RAM, Pico 160 watt PSU +ac/dc adapter block, Sony AD 7640S slot load DVD drive , Samsung 128Gb SSD, Noctua 80mm silent fan, assorted bitmastic sound deadoning pads, Streacom infrared remote control unit + ic board, Streacom F7C series HTC black aluminium chasis, 1 black mesh vent bracket, running windows 7 64 bit o/s, dbpoweramp ripping suite,foobar playback suite, ( ripping to flac ). The unit only uses the one fan to keep everthing cool and so far I have had no problems. The music files are sent to an Icybox IB-3221StU-B JBOD external HDD unit, using 2  1TB  Western Digital hard drives. The 40mm fan in this unit is fairly noisey so I intend changing it for a silent type. I eventually intend to put my music files to SSD and keep the HDDs for my music videos. As yet I have not sorted out a ripping and playback suites for my music videos, but that will soon be sorted. I then feed to a HRT Music Streamer 11+ DAC to a Musical Fidelity  headphone V8 amp + PSU, then to a pair of Grado 325 headphones, using DNM phonos and Wireworld USB cabling. I mostly listen to rock music of all types. Hope you find this helpful.P.S. I am also in the process of upgrading my house mains by putting in a dedicated spur for the media unit and HiFI gear.
 

 

[RonaldDumsfeld]

The key to a quiet PC is to keep the power requirement as low as possible. Low power means less heat and therefore less, or even no, fan noise of any kind.
 
Intel currently designate their low power units with a T suffix. A new Pentium is basically an i3 without the dubious benefit of Hyper-Threading. They also have on chip graphics which will still not play modern games but stream HD 1080 video no problem. Try the Ivy Bridge G2020T. A 2.6GHz dual core with a 35W TDP for £60. Although anything else from the G2nnnT, G8nnT or G6nnT ranges will do and will be even less expensive.
 
You can get so called 'green' RAM. 1.25W DDR3 costs a slight premium over the more usual 1.5W or 1.65W.
 
A 400W Be Quiet power supply with a 93% efficiency Gold certificate and a quiet fan for £50. A totally fanless model with equivalent efficiency will cost twice as much from Seasonic. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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