[MoodySteve]

Hey guys! I recently came across an interesting article written by an anonymous engineer from Israel that basically describes how to make a high-end transport/player out of a PC. It claims to easily rival $20k transports, so I think it's worth investigating, certainly.

Check it out >>> The Art of building Computer Transports

Bear in mind that this is NOT an article on how to optimize your PC for audio playback. Rather, the author takes an extreme approach and basically mods to the computer to the point where it only functions as an audio player. This isn't the kind of thing you'd want to do to the computer that you actually use (e.g. he suggests reverting to 8-bit color, disabling almost everything on the motherboard, not having a video card, etc).

The author also made an interesting media player called cMP which I'm going to try out. It loads the audio to be played in RAM without needing RAMDisk or anything like that.

You can read more about them here>>>Audiolics Anonymous Chapter 105: Home Theater Computer Pt. 2, Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro Stick Article By Bill Gaw and Audiolics Anonymous Chapter 106: Home Theater Computer Pt. 3 Article By Dr. Bill Gaw

Does anyone have any experience with cMP or cPlay? What were your impressions?

 

[philodox]

Cool idea, but I find it pretty insane that he is doing this with Vista... I mean, if he is worried about memory usage and wants to strip down processes and customize the OS, Linux seems like an extremely obvious choice. Or he could just take a Mac Mini and mod the hell out of it.

 

[MoodySteve]

I think that the original author chose Windows XP SP2, and still stands by his view that it's superior to Vista for this application. XP can be very fast if it's not bogged down with services and background programs.

I think that this project is intended to be fairly newbie-friendly, so that's probably why he didn't opt for a Linux distro. And I expect he didn't go for a Mac because they're harder to work on/take apart than custom PCs and he wanted to use a pricey Zalman chassis with a built-in screen.

 

[philodox]

Oh, I've got a tweaked XP install and it can certainly be fast, but it still isn't the best OS for audio. I can understand using Windows in the project, but I was under the impression that those other links were for a polished product that he sells? That's where a custom Linux setup makes a lot of sense. I hear you on the added cost and difficulty working with a Mac, but they are known for their audio quality, so it would definately be worth investigating.

I'd like to see someone build a computer with a Linear power supply... that would be crazy!