Further Adventures in Computer Audio Land

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Ray P
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#1 Further Adventures in Computer Audio Land

Post by Ray P »

After the disappointing experience with the Pro-ject Stream Box I decided that I had two options for getting the main system computer audio connected, these being to save for something like a Linn Akurate DS box or to go the PC route.

The Linn (or similar) approach is safe and seems to offer excellent functionality and sound quality albeit at a premium price.

The PC route is a bit more of an unknown but some initial research revealed three interesting snippets that seem to offer the possibility of good sound. The PC route also offered the DIY challange and was cheaper.

I didn't consider Sono/Squeezebox solutions at all; I've owned a SB Touch and a SB Duet and altough they can be made to sound OK with a bit of work they are a proprietary solution that for me is something of a dead end and won't interoperate with what I already have in place, which is;

1. A home server (WHS 2008) that hosts my library of FLAC music files (close on 1000 CD rips and a small collection of hi-res downloads). The server is located in the hallway next to the router so the small amount of noise from the disks is not an issue in the listening rooms. Asset UPnP is used to manage the music library.

2. My Denon home cinema receiver has a DLNA compliant wired network interface and I stream music to the telly room system from the server using a Samsung Galaxy tablet as the control point (the Galaxy tab can be used as a renderer too so I can plug headphones into it and listen to wirelessly streamed music around the house, albeit transcoded to MP3).

I decided to consider the Linn type approach as the safety net and explore the PC route further. The three interesting snippets I had discovered in my initial research were:

1. JPlay - http://jplay.eu/ - a Kernel streamng player that seems to offer high quality playback on a Windows 7 PC.

2. The Computer Audiophile Pocket Server 2 - http://www.computeraudiophile.com/conte ... r-CAPS-v20 - amodel for a high quality silent audio PC.

3. The ESI Juli@ Sound card - http://www.esi-audio.com/products/julia/ - a high quality PCI sound card with some interesting possibilities; the card has a rotatable analogue output module but it is possible to completely remove this and substitute a board that will offer an I2S digital output over an HDMI connector that matches the I2S input to my RAKK DAC - in theory I2S should improve on a SPDIF input.

I started evaluating from the perspective of operating functionality (don't want to stop anything working as it currently does). JRiver Media Server is the software recommended for the Pocket Server so I downloaded an evaluation copy and installed it on my laptop and populated its library from my home server. It worked out of the box and I was quickly playing music hosted on the server on my laptop. The PC interface to JRiver is very good, though ultimately not a consideration for me. With a little more effort I can now use the Galaxy tablet (via a Free andriod app - Gizmo) to control what is playing on the Denon in the telly room and the laptop - if you substitute a Pocket server for the laptop that looks very promising. I do not need Asset UPnP to be running on the server to do this. It just so happens that JPlay is available as an add-on for JRiver Media Center, though I haven't evaluated it on the laptop.

So, I've decided to build a variation on the Computer Audiophile Pocket Server, substituting the Juli@ sound card for the SoTM USB card. I've ordered a motherboard, memory etc. and hope to start assembling next week. I'll be using an 80Gb OCZ SSD drive to host Windows 7 and JRiver.

The SoTM components of the Pocket Server look interesting, I've ordered a couple of the SATA filters. You can get them in the UK from Item Audio - http://www.itemaudio.com/index.php/upgr ... components

I'll post updates on how it goes.

Ray
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#2

Post by Neal »

An interesting approach Ray, not one I would have gone down but then there seems to be 101 ways of implementing digital audio so I hope it works out for you....
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#3

Post by Ray P »

Neal wrote:An interesting approach Ray, not one I would have gone down but then there seems to be 101 ways of implementing digital audio so I hope it works out for you....
Any particular reason why you wouldn't have gone down this approach? Is there a gotcha I haven't seen?

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#4

Post by Neal »

No, no, it seems a perfectly valid approach....For me though the simpler (IMHO) streaming route over ethernet suits better, no need for filters, special motherboards, audio cards etc. Isolation is provided by the Ethernet connection itself and although some devices are 'proprietary' they are no more so than some of the parts in your solution....horses for courses as they say.

Look forward to reading about how you get on. :)
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#5

Post by Andrew »

I use the Juli@ as for my FTT swept freq measurement system, I have used the digital out and analogue out both 'locked' to the analogue input for swept freq testing of DACs and analogue amps respectively, I like the card. I have listened to it in straight SE mode and reckon its not a bad sound perhaps a bit dry. There's a bit of crosstalk between the channels but its down in the -90dbFS.

I wish they did a PCIe version of it, but there you go! I have several legacy PCI cards and only one PCI slot on my Motherboard so I end up doing the IO card shuffle.

I didn't know it would do I2S out, I just learnt something new. Where do I find out more about the I2S output?

thanks,

Andrew
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#6

Post by Nick »

It will be a interesting project. For me, given a hard disk with music on, I would be tempted to add a SB Touch to the system, no reason why you can't serve the files in more than one way, to at least give you music for the time being. As the saying goes, "done beats perfect".
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#7

Post by pre65 »

If going the SB route, is the "Touch" the one to go for ?
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#8

Post by Cressy Snr »

pre65 wrote:If going the SB route, is the "Touch" the one to go for ?
Yes
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Ray P
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#9

Post by Ray P »

Nick wrote:.....to at least give you music for the time being. As the saying goes, "done beats perfect".
I do have music now, via a conventional silver disk spinner.

Ray
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#10

Post by Ray P »

Andrew wrote:I use the Juli@ as for my FTT swept freq measurement system, I have used the digital out and analogue out both 'locked' to the analogue input for swept freq testing of DACs and analogue amps respectively, I like the card. I have listened to it in straight SE mode and reckon its not a bad sound perhaps a bit dry. There's a bit of crosstalk between the channels but its down in the -90dbFS.

I wish they did a PCIe version of it, but there you go! I have several legacy PCI cards and only one PCI slot on my Motherboard so I end up doing the IO card shuffle.

I didn't know it would do I2S out, I just learnt something new. Where do I find out more about the I2S output?

thanks,

Andrew
Andrew, I intend using only the bottom, digital part of the Juli@ card, taking the I2S from the inter-card connector. Not using the analogue part of the card means crosstalk won't be an issue anyway.

There's info about tapping I2S from the Juli@ card here;

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digital- ... -card.html

Ray
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#11

Post by Ray P »

Neal wrote:....although some devices are 'proprietary' they are no more so than some of the parts in your solution....
Yes, I'm using proprietary components but the overall protocol is open; if you use a squeezebox solution you can only add more squeezeboxes but with DLNA you can add a variety of devices.

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#12

Post by Neal »

Well not AFAIK, You can add other streaming devices to use the same music library at the same time. I did this when testing the Sonos system, it ran in parallel with the squeezeboxes and there's no reason you couldn't directly attach something like an HRT to the media server if it's a PC.....
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#13

Post by Ray P »

OK, perhaps I don't know as much as I thought about squeezecentre, but I still wouldn't entertain reverting to a SB solution.

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#14

Post by Ray P »

Last evening I installed the trial version of JPlay on my laptop and hooked it up to J River Media Centre; I was pleasantly surprised that I could hear a worthwhile improvement event through the onboard laptop sound card and headphones and without paying any attention to what else was running on the laptop.

No problem getting it to work either and I seem to have the full functionality of J River available for remote control, track selection etc.

The product looks promising for my music server build. If you're using a PC to play music it might be worth a look.

Ray
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#15

Post by Clive »

Ray, have you tried the hairshirt JPLAYmini, ie without JRiver? Preferably in Hibernate mode. I found JPLAYmini on its own sounded rather better that JPLAY + JRiver, it would be interesting to know if that's specific to my setup.

Of course if you need a sexy GUI then you need JRiver.
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