I wonder why that is? I would have thought that a properly engineered solution with SSD storage, should have the advantage over an old spinner.
I havent given up hope that someday someone will produce a pc style solution that is better. So i dont have to waste time burning cd's.
Congrats on the purchase, and welcome to the forum.
For those it helps. I thought I'd share my experiences with the PC a little more. I should stress that the below represents an incomplete journey.
Good noise through a PC is about minimalism - mechanical, EMI/RF/etc, timing. This, and I wanted better performance than a Mac Mini.
The main buildSo the hardware. She's very small. I use a Mini-ITX motherboard and an Intel low-power CPU (i3 4130T). Low-voltage memory, though enough to not need a swap file - 8GB is fine (and usually overkill). The machine is fanless and has no optical or mechanical drives installed - I got my case through HD-Plex, it's great quality and reasonably priced. I used a motherboard with built-in WiFi though in all honesty that's not ideal - accordingly my radios (WiFi and Bluetooth) are disabled. Dual gigabit ethernet, if you can get it, is ideal as you're simply getting into more bandwidth for data transfer, particularly if you keep your media uncompressed, or intend on using the same machine for video. On that - get a CPU that has built-in video. What's needed to boot and run it is stored on an SSD.
Update: I've since removed my wireless adapters and removed any extraneous hardware and power cable routing (e.g. you get a power cable for your hard disk which includes interfaces for three more... remove!). A significant difference in performance. Routing
does make a difference, just as it does in any other device. I'll probably upgrade the power wiring internally soon; right now I'm making do with cut and insulated versions of what came with my case.
Get into the BIOS at some stage and disable anything you don't need. This is important.
Power supplyHD-Plex sells a nice and very regulated DC-AC power converter for HiFi use - which I have - and a linear power supply to match (which I'll be testing shortly). For the while I've been using a laptop power supply - not ideal, but it works. This asides all the usual rules apply - if your line power at home isn't exceptional, deal with that first. Craig talked me into a Thor and the difference was, in our home, audible. Your mileage may vary.
Where to store the mediaIt's far easier to have your media elsewhere, not least as SSD's aren't that big but your case will not have room for redundancy, more storage in the same case is more heat and interference. It's easy to run network-attached storage (NAS), just keep the data pipes big enough - CAT6 wiring, use a good switch (not an el-cheapo home router). Most good NAS have more than one Ethernet port and it's possible to run them as an aggregated link. Max out whatever RAM your NAS can take. Do what you need to in order to not drop any bits along the way! I'm having some pretty good success here; the usage experience is flawless - you'd not be aware the data's stored >25m away. Back to back it doesn't make difference if it's local - we don't even drop frames with Blu-ray media (ripped and stored - she hates the look of the Blu-ray player, so what discs we own are ripped and served over the network).
Choice of operating systemThere's only one: Linux. You might be able to have direct access to the audio device though some interesting driver trickery in Windows, but
you can't control or change operating system timing, which is partially where the magic is - it's a function of two things: (1) being able to alleviate responsibilities the operating system has, and (2) actually changing the way the operating system schedules tasks.
It's really simple: you can't rebuild Windows yourself. Windows is built with broad considerations - for some people it's a server, for some people it's an audio player, for some it's a gaming rig, for some it does a bit of everything. And it has to cover a wide variety of software and hardware. Great for general purpose use, not so great for single-minded audio greatness. It is possible to rebuild OS X to some degree (I understand Eric Hider at dB Audio Labs is doing similarly to great effect), though you're limited to spec hardware.
Linux is ultimately very flexible. And free. You'll need patience. I started with Ubuntu 14.04 because it's convenient an easy to play with, though you can start with something lighter if you know your end goals at the start (again, it's Linux, so you're free to chop anything to size). From there:
- Uninstall any program you won't need.
- Remove any web services you won't need.
- Install some media playing interfaces. I run Kodi (what was XBMC) and mpd/mpc - the latter is a pure 'hit the audio hardware directly' utility and will serve as your back-to-back benchmark in comparing any work you'll do. Kodi has a nice trick in that it can be controlled via a phone or tablet app on the same network, so if your TV has any audible qualities you don't like (as per mine), you can control things fairly painlessly and with zero background noise penalty.
- Remove Pulseaudio, the audio server - every operating system has something similar to make sure that any sound from any source can be played through any output (essentially a mixer/resampler/sequencer/effects engine), the difference in Linux is that you can actually remove it. Why? It resamples poorly, and though you can amend that to some degree, we don't need to play more than one source at a time, and we'll ensure our audio sources are Redbook anyway.
- Edit configuration files for the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) - one simple tweak is required - set the mixing frequency to 44.1kHz. Redbook audio will no longer be resampled, period. You can't delete ALSA and don't want to, not least because if you're being hyper-modern about life you'll probably have made the same key oversight I made, and built yourself a system with no analogue volume control (so you'll need to do that in software). ALSA has a mixer, "dmix", but you don't want it to resample Redbook (with some trickery you can set what it does and doesn't resample, if at all - useful if what happens south of your computer doesn't deal with 44.1kHz and 48kHz frequencies equally).
- Make sure you're ripping everything as uncompressed PCM or Craig and Steve will rightly never let you hear the end of it Linux has plenty of good and free utilities for this, I use abcde - does full error/CRC checking, generates metadata, and the related ripping engine is CDParanoia - which is about as exacting as the title sounds. If you want something with AccurateRip, try Morituri.
- Set it up to boot into something easy to use though lightweight (mine boots straight to Kodi).
- Any other tweaks you think you'll need for ease of use.
At this point things are sounding
pretty damn good, though we want
friggn awesome levels of both audio and nerdism, so we push on.
Linux, like Windows (and to a lesser degree, OS X) is built to run with a number of programs and hardware configurations. It's also built generalist. Let's deal with the second first - you can build a Linux kernel (the "guts" of the operating system, per se) to be low-latency (as opposed to "get the task done when possible"): to get our bits out in order better, effectively less jitter (not quite, I did say "effectively"). A low-latency kernel is second best to a "real-time" build - a kernel that delivers on priority as requested, which is pretty much what we need for audio. Try this guide:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2273355. I'd install the low-latency kernel too (that's a package in Ubuntu, you don't need to follow a guide and compile it) simply to let you go between the three options at boot and hear the difference... which should be significant (you can't do this much in Windows or OS X). There's reputedly a build of Linux called "Audiophile Linux" that gets you around this far, though you'll not have built a machine that's as flexible (e.g. if you plan on using it for video too, not ideal).
You can tweak around with PAM privileges at this point (essentially the real-time priority your computer gives certain tasks - putting audio replication first is essential).
If you've followed that particular guide and still have the necessary files
you can now go further still, and remove a ton of stuff in the OS that your computer doesn't actually use. Drawbacks? If you change hardware you'll need to rebuild this much - fine if you're happy with your hardware.
So what to do:
- Unplug anything you don't need (you do not need that flash drive/joystick/bluetooth dongle/etc to play audio etc)
- Before the "make menuconfig" portion of the linked guide, run "make localmodconfig" as a command. There will be a few questions to answer, however it'll configure a kernel relative to the hardware installed on your system only. A (frankly) incredible amount of stuff will be left out. If you want super boot speed you can use "make localyesconfig" (essentially stuff that you might use is loaded rather than being loaded on-demand - when you're well stripped back, the latter works well).
Continue as per normal. When you next reboot your audio will sound considerably more detailed and your CPU usage should have dropped accordingly. It's entirely possible to play in great detail at this stage: "make localmodconfig" prior to "make menuconfig" will give a good baseline, though in the latter command you'll be able to nix a lot more stuff for networking, security (particularly if your computer isn't in a network or downstream of a firewall). It's an iterative process, every now and then you'll remove something the PC really needed to boot correctly, so long as you're always saving your last best configuration, you're fine.
You will end up with an operating system tailored to playing music best with the hardware you have. My PC doesn't know it has a wireless card, a built-in audio system or anything else. It knows it connects to a TV over HDMI with no audio support, and that the only audio path is over USB to the KillerDAC. Plug anything new into it and it'll shrug it's shoulders and be (broadly) digitally inert to it.
I'm still playing with it though the gains have been considerable.
Stuff I've left outWork thus far gets bits and what not well-aligned to their digital output, namely USB in my instance, but says nothing for the cable itself - I'm working on that much. There's a difference between the 50c and $4 cables I have, though there's obviously much to go.
I'm keen to hear what the power supply upgrade does.
I've no idea what seismic isolation does to a PC. A later project will be trying to build as much to see, if anything.
Digital room correction is entirely possible. Look up DRC, DRC Designer and BruteFIR. I'm still a little behind here but have a few wicked room modes to tame. Linux has been a bit prickly to get a USB microphone interface working in; mine runs into a laptop accordingly. Having done a good bit of work to minimise CPU load, I'd be keen to limit a convolution engine to a dedicated CPU core or similar. There are nice little DSP boxes that will do this externally, though I'm yet to find (for lack of investigation) something that does I2S in/out and processes at 44.1kHz.
As for the rest of what possible, I'd welcome other's experiences, thoughts and suggestions.