Best sound yet??

[Feanor]

Too early to tell for sure, but this evening I have the impression I'm hearing some of the best sound yet from by computer-source music. The configuration:

ALAC files from external hard drive attached to my dedicated XP machine
Foobar2000 9.6.9, using
SoX resampler, upsampling to 176.4 kbps, linear phase
Kernel Streaming to my M-Audio Revolution 7.1 sound card
30' S/PDIF Blue Jeans Cable (Belden 1694A), thence
My cheapo DIY DAC (http://forums.audioreview.com/showthread.php?t=30879), (OPA2604 opamp), to
QED II interconnects, 1.5', (just replaced Kimber PBJ 3').

[harley .guy07]

You built your own dac. I wouldn't mind knowing if you used a kit design or did you design your own? I am in the market for a dac and am looking at several different ones and am on the fence on which one to choose. I have been looking at the Musiland MD-10 but am open to a DIY project if it could be a better sounding unit and save me some money to boot.

[Feanor]

You built your own dac. I wouldn't mind knowing if you used a kit design or did you design your own? I am in the market for a dac and am looking at several different ones and am on the fence on which one to choose. I have been looking at the Musiland MD-10 but am open to a DIY project if it could be a better sounding unit and save me some money to boot.
Well, I didn't exactly build my DAC from scratch; I bought a board on eBay and put in a box. Check out my earlier thread which I link above. There are a lot of DIY options on eBay.

[poppachubby]

Well Bill, this makes 2 of us marveling at our soundcard's audio ability. I've been listening to my TT plugged into my card as well, the result is mind bogglingly fun. Glad you're havin fun with yours.

[JoeE SP9]

My PC's sound card is my preference for everything but serious listening. I have been busy ripping selected tracks from CD's and LP's to an HD. Basically my favorite selections from everything is or will be in a mix on my music server.

I've tried the cards internal DAC and my MSB DAC. The internal DAC is pretty good. Creative claims it's "pro" quality. They are exagerating only a little. My MSB has a little more smoothness and detail but the card has great bass. It's not bloated or excessive, just a little more promonent than the MSB. I prefer the MSB overall. I don't know how the card will stand up to a comparison with a newer DAC. That will have to wait till next year. That's when I plan on upgrading my DAC.

The remote for the sound card along with the supplied software can turn you into a true couch potato. I haven't tried a Squeezebox or Soolos or other dedicated server so I have no way to compare. I can say, this card with the supplied remote could turn me into a believer. I don't even need to use my PC monitor. The display from it is tied into my system. So, my TV can be switched to display my PC.

The hardest part is ripping music to my PC. That's probably because I've been using EAC to make bit perfect "rips". I do quite a bit of entertaining and creating customized play lists is a true joy. When Maureen (for example) visits I just pull up her playlist hit play and I can devote my time to more important things. I have playlists for other female friends. They are easy to create and convenient to use.

BTW: I use no compression of any kind. I bought HDD's large enough to make compression unnecessary. Hard drive space is cheap enough that compression makes no sense.

[poppachubby]

I do quite a bit of entertaining and creating customized play lists is a true joy. When Maureen (for example) visits I just pull up her playlist hit play and I can devote my time to more important things. I have playlists for other female friends. They are easy to create and convenient to use.



Nice post Lance Romance, yet another reason to go digital....

[Feanor]

Well Bill, this makes 2 of us marveling at our soundcard's audio ability. I've been listening to my TT plugged into my card as well, the result is mind bogglingly fun. Glad you're havin fun with yours.
Bear in mind, Chubbs, that the sound card as I'm using it only coverts the bits to S/PDIF to be send to the external DAC.

I'm confident that I can get bit-perfect data transmission via S/PDIF in that my older DAC's HDCD indicator lights when the source is HDCD encode. But note that with XP you must use Kernel Streaming or an ASIO driver to get bit-perfect output. Given bit-perfect data transmission, the only other issue is jitter; this is where the 30 ft. S/PDIF cable might be a positive factor.

Incidentally,HDCD encoding is recovered from ALAC or FLAC lossless files, i.e. you don't need uncompressed WAV files to perserve HDCD capability.

[Feanor]

My PC's sound card is my preference for everything but serious listening. I have been busy ripping selected tracks from CD's and LP's to an HD. Basically my favorite selections from everything is or will be in a mix on my music server.

I've tried the cards internal DAC and my MSB DAC. The internal DAC is pretty good. Creative claims it's "pro" quality. They are exagerating only a little. My MSB has a little more smoothness and detail ...

The hardest part is ripping music to my PC. That's probably because I've been using EAC to make bit perfect "rips". I do quite a bit of entertaining and creating customized play lists is a true joy. When Maureen (for example) visits I just pull up her playlist hit play and I can devote my time to more important things. I have playlists for other female friends. They are easy to create and convenient to use.

BTW: I use no compression of any kind. I bought HDD's large enough to make compression unnecessary. Hard drive space is cheap enough that compression makes no sense.

Creative's hyperbole, I should say. I haven't done a lot of listening to my M-Audio sound card's analog output, but I have the strong impression that the dynamics and resolution were much less good than I get from the external DAC.

I rip using dBpoweramp which is certainly easier to use than EAC and does offer comparable 'secure' modes to ensure accuracy. As a poor person, disk space is still a consideration for me, so I rip to a lossless format either Apple Lossless (ALAC) or FLAC. I hear no difference in sound quality between the lossless and uncompressed WAV; lots of people claim to, of course, but then some people claim Brilliant Pebbles make a night-and-day difference too. Bear in mind that decoding lossless is an extremely trivial task for a modern CPU.

[JoeE SP9]

Feanor, I got a good deal on two 1 Terrabyte SATA drives. My brother is the chief tech at a local computer store. So, I got them for a good price. Each one should hold around 1600 uncompressed RBCD's. I've got them set up as mirrored drives so I have a backup. I don't really need it because all the music on them is from my collection anyway. So, I could use both and store more than 3200 RBCD's.
For all 2 channel music listening I use my MSB Full Nelson DAC with the upgraded power supply. It does up and over sampling. IMO there's nothing better for less than $2500. It also makes transports very hard to tell apart.
I'm still more than a little surprised how good the DAC in my SB card actually is. It's a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Pro Elite. The external interface box makes it easy to connect it to my system. The remote makes it very convenient to use.

[poppachubby]

Ya, I'm a notch below you with the Audigy Platinum Joe. But same deal, the remote center in the drive bay is a dream. Really makes the product for me. I have no analog out, would be a nice feature. I have had it for a few months now but still am impressed with it.

My amp is in the shop right now but I don't care really, the computer is keeping me plenty happy.

[Feanor]

Feanor, I got a good deal on two 1 Terrabyte SATA drives. My brother is the chief tech at a local computer store. So, I got them for a good price. Each one should hold around 1600 uncompressed RBCD's. I've got them set up as mirrored drives so I have a backup. I don't really need it because all the music on them is from my collection anyway. So, I could use both and store more than 3200 RBCD's.
...

It's always good to have a backup given what a big job it would be to have to rerip a huge collection.

If you have all the disk space you'll need a long time, then uncompressed WAV might be the best approach, although there is that other issue: metadata tagging. Some players such as iTunes will neither read tags from, nor write tags, to WAV files. This is not too big a problem if your only ever going to use iTunes because iTunes maintains its own metadata library in a separate, XML-format file. However if you wanted to start playing your WAV files using another player, (e.g. Foobar2000 as in my case), you'd be SOL as far as metadata info is concerned.

So, contrary to common impression, WAV files do accomodate tags, it's just that some players, e.g. iTunes last I heard, do not recognize them. On the other hand virtually all players recognized tags in FLAC format -- well, except that iTunes on Windows machines won't handle FLAC. :crazy:

[Feanor]

Too early to tell for sure, but this evening I have the impression I'm hearing some of the best sound yet from by computer-source music. The configuration:

ALAC files from external hard drive attached to my dedicated XP machine
Foobar2000 9.6.9, using
SoX resampler, upsampling to 176.4 kbps, linear phase
Kernel Streaming to my M-Audio Revolution 7.1 sound card
30' S/PDIF Blue Jeans Cable (Belden 1694A), thence
My cheapo DIY DAC (http://forums.audioreview.com/showthread.php?t=30879), (OPA2604 opamp), to
QED II interconnects, 1.5', (just replaced Kimber PBJ 3').

My positive impression of this setup is persisting. There are a few of things worth noting.

First, I'm talking about a cheapo, $60 DAC. It's remarkable performance with due regard to this fact. Why should this be? Maybe someone would care to speculate. For one thing, the signal path in the DAC is very short & simple:
digital receiver => DAC => opamp => multiplex mixer which I'd guess is to buffer the opamp for lower output impedance.

Secondly, I suspect the SoX resampler plugin for Foobar2000 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=67373) is a very big factor. As reported in my earlier thread, I was unimpressed with this DAC using no resampling or the standard Foobar PPHS resampler.


To dispell any confusion, the cheapo DAC handles is 24/192, but it does not upsample. What SoX is doing is software upsampling, (or for me, maybe just oversampling since I'm taking 44.1 kHz resampling an even multiple of 4x to 176.4 kHz). I intend to experiment with SoX' filtering options, that is Miniumum -to- Linear phase selection; right now I'm liking Linear phase.
Please don't ask: the filtering aspect is too technical for me to wholely understand much less explain. This SoX link (http://sox.sourceforge.net/Main/HomePage) is the best I can do a the moment. Note that some DACs such as the Cambridge DacMagic offer these filtering choices in hardward thanks to the Wolfson DAC chip.Other than these majoir items, it's quite possible that I got some improvement from the shorter, 1.5' QED II interconnects vs. the 3' Kimber PDBs I had been using between the DAC and preamp. (Hey, I've never said different interconects couldn't make a difference.)