computer music player

[Graham Wintersgill]

Stephen

XBMC software is available on many platforms and will act as your front end. It is free so if you do not like it just delete it.

Regards

Graham

[Dan Hintz]

Sorry, Eric... replace the word "MP3" with "compression" in my statement.

I will not get into an audio quality debate with anyone who claims to have golden ears, because the debate always boils down to them saying they can hear things that are quantifiably unmeasurable. As I said, my educational background is in digital signal processing (audio and video), particularly as it pertained to imperceptible watermarking (both audio and video) and half of my career was spent working in that field. I'm well aware of how compression affects quality from a perceptible viewpoint. That's all I'll say on the matter.

[Stephen Cherry]

Stephen

XBMC software is available on many platforms and will act as your front end. It is free so if you do not like it just delete it.

Regards

Graham

Got it Graham, I'll check it out. THanks

[Stephen Cherry]

I will not get into an audio quality debate with anyone who claims to have golden ears, because the debate always boils down to them saying they can hear things that are quantifiably unmeasurable. .

Dan- I wanted to have a discussion with you about speaker cables. Which do you think sound the best.

[Stephen Cherry]

The next part in the playback chain is how you get from a digital file to PCM format (or AES/EBU), with the final part being conversion of the digital stream to analog audio. Let's take a computer first. I have found a very, very significant difference from going from something like the headphone output of a computer to using a USB audio device. If you have a good DAC on your stereo, one of the easiest things to do is just get a USB/PCM converter--something like the M-Audio Transit. I've used devices like the Transit to get pretty good results--you still manage playback through something like iTunes or Windows Media Player, but the audio out gets routed to the USB and emerges as PCM from a coax digital connector. I've also built a purpose specific computer to do audio, and installed a specialized audio card--an EMU 4040, I think--which used digital stereo AES/EBU outputs. If you don't have a DAC already, you can also buy a range of USB DACs that combine the USB/PCM interface and a DAC. I have not used any of those other than the MusicStreamer II in my office, but seem to recall that Apogee makes a nice one. The MusicStreamer II works fine for my office stereo, but that isn't exactly the best setup in the world (McCormack Micro-Line Drive to Micro-Power Drive to NHT SuperZeros). Out of these setups, I've like the sound from the EMU card best, followed by the M-Audio, followed by the MusicStreamer, but that isn't a really fair comparison, given that the EMU was attached to either a dCS or Theta DAC at different times.
.

Eric, my amplifier is DACless. It's a NAD C370- a pretty solid amp, which sounds great to me, but it has nothing exotic. I would be looking for a box to go from the computer to the analog inputs of the amp. Plus, thanks for the detailed response, I am trying to decipher it.

[Eric DeSilva]

Sorry, Dan, stating that you aren't going to debate something and then throwing down a strawman that positions my argument as "saying [I] can hear things that are quantifiably unmeasurable" is rhetorical sleight of hand.

MP3s can be widely varying quality, and it isn't just the sampling rate that impacts the perceived quality. You have said that there is no "difference between [a WAV] and an MP3 using VBR at the best quality level." There is also virtually no compression running, say, LAME at a V0 quality setting. So I'd argue there isn't much point in doing the encoding. There is, presumably, no debate that "compression affects quality"--the only question is at what point the quality becomes perceptible. But when the difference is a filesize of 7-8 MB versus 30-40 MB, why even have the debate? I can easily buy 2TB drives for under $100--so we're talking less than a penny per song.

[Ryan Mooney]

So regardless of the quality issue or lack thereof I would argue against storing your primary backup in a compressed format anyway. The problem is that if you ever want to convert them to another format or downsample again (for space like say you want to store 128b VBR for a portable device where quality is less critical) the compression errors compound.

The big three lossless formats at this point are WAV, SHRTN and FLAC. I'd personally recommend FLAC, it compresses better than WAV (still lossless) and is widely supported and the decoding cost (cpu performance) is relatively low compared to WAV. Having said that you can convert between any of the three with any decent en/decoding software with zero loss in quality and down sample if you want for portable use. The only real reason to use WAV is if you're doing a lot of editing as most of the editors use it natively (but many now support the other formats as well).

For playback even pretty low end junky computers nowadays have digital output - if your receiver can accept it that's the way to go. Personally I'm a big fan of the small devices like the ROKU or Google TV (I think there are some raspberrypie ones as well - haven't looked in a ~year so completely out of date ) that don't have any moving parts for in the living room next to the receiver for a couple of reasons:

• They are quiet. Nothing like a disk drive or computer fan whirring away to ruin my enjoyment
• They are small so don't take up any media center space to speak of

We have a tower style case with a computer and a handful of drives in it in the office and I ran a couple of Cat-6 cables up to the media center area. The computer in the back exports the music and the front end pulls it over the wire and shoves it into the receiver. For just music you can also easily do that over wireless - you can get wireless "game adapters" that work pretty ok that you can just plug into the roku/whatever (and I think some may? come with wireless now). Simpler (and likely cheaper) than the computer as a backend would be a "Lan Storage Device" which is essentially a hard drive (or several) in a very small case with a network port on the back. Most of them support exporting media in ways that the various front end devices can access easily. We wanted to do more nefarious things with the computer so it added some value for us but for most users I wouldn't probably bother at this point.

For examples of network storage see: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_no...work%20storage
I haven't researched any recently enough to actually recommend any at this point.

we have the Roku 2HD that has: mini-jack to left/right/composite video RCA and Digital over HDMI (5.1 surround sound pass-through and stereo) - we've only ever used the HDMI output - I'm pretty sure it was a fiber HDMI port. We used to have the Google TV the Roku is much nicer. Granted this does a whole lot more than just music

If you search for "raspberry pi media center" you can see how people have made their own - although I would argue that if you're asking this question you probably don't want to go there

Looks like Eric S has some good advice on some other playback devices as well.

[Dan Hintz]

Dan- I wanted to have a discussion with you about speaker cables. Which do you think sound the best.

Well, the pink ones, obviously, Steve... electrons travel faster in pink (for fear of getting beat up!).

Sorry, Dan, stating that you aren't going to debate something and then throwing down a strawman that positions my argument as "saying [I] can hear things that are quantifiably unmeasurable" is rhetorical sleight of hand.

MP3s can be widely varying quality, and it isn't just the sampling rate that impacts the perceived quality. You have said that there is no "difference between [a WAV] and an MP3 using VBR at the best quality level." There is also virtually no compression running, say, LAME at a V0 quality setting. So I'd argue there isn't much point in doing the encoding. There is, presumably, no debate that "compression affects quality"--the only question is at what point the quality becomes perceptible. But when the difference is a filesize of 7-8 MB versus 30-40 MB, why even have the debate? I can easily buy 2TB drives for under $100--so we're talking less than a penny per song.

No amount of debate will make you change your mind, Eric, so I will not waste my breath trying to. Enjoy your music.

[Jim Matthews]

I bought an Asus Eee box to run JRiver, and there's a new version out so v18 will likely be discounted soon.
You can interface with your Smart phone as a remote, and that's handy.

I've got a new NAD M51 preamp/DAC that I quite like, but my old preamp had recently failed (again) so you may not need to spend such long green.
I quite like the NuForce line, which handles computer audio without hiccups, and isn't hideously expensive.

For me, the nice thing is to have the files stored elsewhere. If you have a large storage that can be searched by the Oppo BDP-103, you may not need another DAC.
If the Oppo player can search your computer memory, and playback the files it's an effective music server controller.

I attached a small monitor to mine, so I can see what it's searching as the stock display is illegible from my listening position.