First, please do not flame me for my audiophile pursuits or highjack this thread discussing the value or fantasy of high fidelity. Just let people like me wallow in our delusions.

The purpose of this post is to present my very workable audiophile server system as I am sure there are folks like me out there pounding their head against a wall trying to figure out this vexing puzzle.

My audiophile music server system:

Objectives:
• Create an audiophile sound system using network storage for digital music
• Network storage required as to be expandable (just add another drive) and accessible by any PC on the network (link into stereo, play from PCs and all at the same time playing different files)
• Get sound quality as close to a CD in my CD player as possible
• Any lossy compression is unacceptable due to sound quality degradation
• Must have no-effort library organization, tagging, management and see album covers (I have a huge music collection 1500+ CDs)
• Must have no manipulation of digital stream; I want pure bit-for-bit transfer with no jitter to the DAC (digital to analog converter)
• Use off-the-shelf common components and old, used, cheap computers (to make this system livable in a home, you will need a dedicated PC in your home stereo rack but it can be an old XP clunker)
• Ability to use audiophile DACs independent of the computer-based delivery system
• Use my existing, home stereo to deliver the sound

Results:
• 95% there. For some reason the sound is not as good as my direct CD player but still excellent and very high fidelity (I use my CD player’s DACs for digital to analog conversion so I have a great A-B comparison setup for comparing a CD with its ripped WAV files)
• Perfect for high quality casual listening and will stand as an audiophile system

Wish List:
• Remote control over PC / Foobar player
• Faster ripping
• Faster library management from Windows Media Player 11 (library speed is really terrible; for playback, you will be using Foobar’s very decent library facility to search and play, you will need to manipulate the library a bit and therefore you will be using the ripper’s library tools especially if your CD collection spans more than one disk drive)
• Perfectly reproduced music (HA!)

Effort and Challenges to get here:
• Very limited information on audiophile pursuits in computing convergence
• ‘Net seams not to care about perfect reproduction, just cool gadgetry
• ‘Net likes gadgets such as digital sound processing software that just wrecks the listening experience (for me… just leave me alone on this ok?)
• ‘Net only seemed to care about ripping compress/decompress speed and file sizing; no one seems to care about audio quality
• Vendors of sound cards don’t care about perfect transfer, they are catering to the gadget-buying public; they produce little to no data for folks like me scanning the huge selection of sound cards so buying a card is a gamble (I purchased the Audigy only because they had a bullet in their technical documentation that allowed for 44.1 and bit-for-bit throughput settings)
• Window sucks royally as a music delivery system – they up-sample everything to 48K and they do a very poor job of it resulting in really cloudy, muddy, and harsh sound quality and you have no control over the bit stream; on top of that, Microsoft provides virtually no usable information on their architecture; nor does Dell and frankly, I don’t really know who is to blame here but my research points to Microsoft’s underlying architecture
• You would think with what I want, simple 100% accurate bit-for-bit transfer, would be the easiest, cheapest thing to do!
• Rippers are slow and have bad library management (tried ‘em all! Media Monkey, EAC, WinAmp. etc. etc.) and Windows Media Player 11 is the best (not good, just the best)
• This took about 1 year of on and off-again tinkering with huge amounts of experimentation (thank goodness my Accuphase interprets many different standards and provides a display of the sampling rate input to it)

The Home Network:

• Maxtor 500 Gig & Maxtor 300 Gig network drives
• Linksys wireless G network (WRT54G as access point only)
• Linksys router/firewall (BEFSX41)
• No Linksys “speed booster”
• I like Linksys because their ports are switched and not shared hubs eliminating one source of network contention

The Rip Station (get my CDs into storage):
• 6-year old Dell Desktop (used only for ripping and library management)
• Windows XP
• Windows Media Player 11, error correction on (best library organization I found)
• WAV rips (storage is cheap so why compress?)
• Connected to network via Ethernet (100 mbit) only because I didn’t want to spend money for a wireless card for this clunker and the PC is a few feet from my router

The Player (stereo playback):
• 3-year old Dell laptop (used only for music playback) located in my home stereo rack
• Windows XP
• Linksys wireless USB 2.0 G
• Foobar 2000 player (Windows Media Player and others just won’t work!)
o No sound manipulation (equalizers etc.)
o Native 44.1; no sample conversions
o Direct kernel streaming to bypass any manipulative components (critical feature!!!)
o Buffer set to max to eliminate juddering from drive or network contention
o Foobar setup: http://www.uoregon.edu/~jroullie/mysetup.html (thanx dude! You “get it”) (you will need this setup as Foobar is tough to use without an enhanced configuration such as this)
o XM Radio streaming – low fidelity but cooool.
• SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS PCMCIA card
o 44.1 (setting)
o Bit-for-bit transfer (setting)
o Uninstalled Audigy mixer/volume control via Windows XP (just in case)
o Not using its DACs; just using it for digital transfer out
o Optical out
• Audio Alchemy DTI Pro 32 (for jitter reduction; not required but does improve sound)
o Optical in
o Dither set to “off” (16 bit transfer)
o Coax out
• Accuphase DP-67 CD Player (has digital inputs so can use as a DAC)
• 2 VTL Deluxe 300 tube amplifiers
• Magnepan 20 speakers
• MIT cabling Accuphase-to-VTL-to-Magnepan

These two points are at odds with each other. .wav files do not support tagging.

i love these "why compress" arguments...

also, the "media management" features of EAC sucking seem like a personal limitation to me.

if you are using foobar for the library and playback it doesn't matter what ripper you use, as long as it tags appropriately. - and they are called LOSSLESS formats for a reason, yo...

perhaps you shouldn't throw XP on a 6 year old computer, let alone a dell.

this could only get better if you had used compaq


later

I guess I used the word tagging improperly. What I want is the song names as WAV file names, and all the other "tag" information such as album artist etc. to appear in a player. Windows Media Player will create the artist folder, a sub-folder for each album, song titles as file names, and will track all the important "tag" information and will do this ripping WAV files.

Foobar will pull all this up even though they are WAV files. I am not sure how all of this is stored and retrieved during ripping... I don't understand it to this level. However, when ripping WAV files, Windows Media Player 11 does this "tagging" in spades (however they do it). Ripping WAV files with other rippers... well I just could not get them to organize easily. Just could not get them to do it. With Windows Media Player, I can set it to rip automatically when a disc is inserted and all the library organization and data is done for me with no intervention. Remember, I have 1500+ CDs to rip so it must be easy or I won't do it. I just insert, close, wait, remove, repeat - 1500 times.

I am no fan of Microsoft but their player does it better for ripping WAVs... I really did spend stupid amounts of time with the other rippers and they just didn't work well given my requirements.

Also, Foobar is reading from this Windows Media Player library and finds and displays all this "tag" metadata correctly.

As mentioned earlier, the problem with WAV is there is no standard tagging. The metadata can or will be stored in the specific application's database (like WMP 11 or iTunes, for example)... but you'll have all sorts of pain if you plan on using other applications.

I am not sure what your comment about Dell and compaq is getting at. My intent with this setup was to be as hardware agnostic as possible. I believe that anyone could use this setup and use almost any mainstream computer manufacture with the exact same results. Actually, I suspect that others could do as I did and get these computers for free as friends upgrade (as I did).

Regarding lossless formats such as FLAC and WMA Lossless... well you won't believe it but I A/B's them against WAV and I could hear a difference. I don't know why but I did. Yes, I may be deluded but that is my story. I ripped WAV, FLAC, and WMA Lossless for the same disc in my CD drive and simply A/B/C/D'd them all. I will admit that having this audiophile hobby for about 30 years now I am very paranoid about giving something up needlessly. In other words, storage is cheap so why worry about it? Music is very important to me; it is a very deep personal thing, and I've spent much time and money over these years trying to get the best sound possible so why screw around with something such as compression that has no value to me?

Also regarding lossless, my objective in using old cheap/free equipment may be comromised by an old processor grinding the decompress process. With bit-for-bit WAV, there is no processor time spent on this task. I will admit I did not see a problem with it, again, why fool with it if WAV works?

Bruce, the lowest end boxes (including el cheapo dedicated NAS boxes) can decode Lossless without too much effort. For example, a Linksys $60 NSLU2 (Slug) running a full media server can decode FLAC and send it as uncompressed WAV to my Roku SoundBridge M1000 connected to a DAC + high-end audio system. Heck, I haven't used my high-end CD transport in years. There is no need. As good or better.

And yes, you are doing something wrong or just imagining differences between Uncompressed and the same content compressed using a Lossless method such as WMA Lossless, FLAC or Apple Lossless.

WAV it is, then--the only thing is, as said above, it's harder to do library management with WAV than WMA lossless or FLAC. Only if you could convince yourself that you're just imagining differences. . .

somehow I get this feeling that you'd get a more "acceptable" response on an audiophile forum. head-fi, perhaps?

Technically, WAV does support tagging of metadata, in the RIFF WAV format. Thing is, the RIFF data is truly freeform. And sadly, support for reading RIFF metadata is quite limited. Hey, at least MS tried doing something useful.

Are you sure that this is not your sound card or its drivers, rather than Windows itself?


You want bit-perfect audio and yet you use a fairly insecure ripper?

I don't know how your .wav files are being tagged, if you say that foobar2000 can read the data as well.

SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS PCMCIA card
o 44.1 (setting)
o Bit-for-bit transfer (setting)
o Uninstalled Audigy mixer/volume control via Windows XP (just in case)
o Not using its DACs; just using it for digital transfer out

This seems like the weak link to me. Have you confirmed that it does not resample?
Have you done a bit for bit compare on the output versus the original signal?
Does the udial sample play back normally?

I personally would avoid creative products like the plague due to past experiences of my own involving resampling issues.

I thought all Audigy cards resampled in hardware to 48KHz?

Not even in an audiophile forum I heard such blasphemy!

i was thinking the same. I'm having a close setup and use the pphs resampler to upsample to 48.

BTW bruce-in-phily, my remote control solution is http://www.ir2pc.com/ with the last free girder 3 (4 is terribly bloatful and expensive). It's a lot of configuring work, but very rewarding. With the girder multigroups, you have especially the advantage of doing batch jobs. Example: with pressing an rc key you can do more actions at once (turn shuffle on, turn replaygain track gain mode on, turn crossfading on). Also you can have multiple functions plus OSD display on one key.

Amen.

What is a blind ABX test?

Foobar2000
WinABX
PCABX

Have a look at No 8:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=3974

Prove it or simply do not claim it.



So it is time, to think yourself.



Possibility for tagging?
Error robustness?
Hardware support?

In other words: Why fill you harddiskspace with WAV when you can use lossless and save up to 30, 40 or even more %?? Know: You never have enough disk space.

I'm surprised nobody here has pointed out that pretty much everything that Bruce-in-Philly is aiming to achieve has already been done by Slim Devices. I strongly urge Bruce to check out what they have to offer before expending huge amounts of additional effort.

(NB: I have no connection to Slim Devices other than as a highly satisfied customer. I own a Squeezebox2 and a Transporter).

"All lossless codecs are equal but some are more equal than others."

Only the ones with 10kX chips in them. That covers nearly all the cards, but some lack this chip (and hence lack all it's features, like hardware EAX) and pass bits without resampling. It's been discussed here before, but I can't find the exact threads.

I completely agree with cliveb about slimdevices. Their stuff is great and while I don't agree with their marketing their quality is excellent.

If you have a PSP capable of homebrew (and WIFI), another solution of remote controlling would be to use a program that can interact with controlserver. Not just a remote control, could be a complete interface too.

lossless is not lossless

I don't see what the point of being so anal about bit perfect sound reproduction is when you're using a tube amp as the final stage which distorts the hell out of the music? They're hardly known for accurate reproduction, which seems to be the point of this exercise.

Each and everyone of us is entitled to her/his own opinions, beliefs and preferences. Actually speakers and headphones "distort the hell out of music" a lot more than any good tube amp. Besides, (bad) resampling will introduce artifacts that are clearly audible, whether using a tube amp or transistor amp.
So, it's quite OK to be anal about bit-perfect sound reproduction, which BTW is quite easy to achieve at very low cost nowadays.

I'm intruiged by your comment about Slim Devices' marketing. What is it they do (or don't do) that you have an issue with? (I'm not trying to be defensive here, I'm genuinely interested).

Your ripper does not have to be part of your library management. In my case, Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is my ripper, foobar2000 is my encoder (LAME mp3), and iTunes is my library management software since I am using an iPod.

I've been doing some massive CD rips to load up my 80 GB iPod. I understand your need for the ripping process to be simple. You can accomplish this with EAC. It can be configured to automatically do a database lookup for the track information, put the files in certain directories based on artist, genre, album title, etc (e.g. genre\artist\(year)Album Title\tracks), and eject the disc when done.

If speed is what you want but you'd still like to catch errors, EAC is again your tool of choice. As long as your CD reader supports C2 errors, you can configure EAC to perform fast secure rips and at least tell you that something went wrong. You can then easily listen to the problem area in the file to see if it was an audible error. You can choose to ignore it or re-rip the disc after cleaning it. Windows Media player will just ignore the error and you'll never know about it.

Once you have all of the wave files created, you can use foobar2k to convert to FLAC (a lossless codec. It is like zipping a data file, period). Since you ripped the wave files into a nice heirarchical directory structure using EAC, using foobar2000 to create the tags is a cinch.

Note that these last two steps can be performed in a batch mode. Yeah, it will take a long time, but you kick it off before you go to bed and depending on how much audio you ripped, it will be done when you get up in the morning.

The short version here is that you will not find a single tool to do all you need efficiently. Whenever I've moved to a new digital audio player (mp3 CD player, Sony HD3, iPod video), I always have to spend a significant amount of time figuring out what software tools I'll need to create and manage my library.

Now that I've used a heirarchical directory structure that captures all of the "tag" information in it, I can move to any new library management software very easily. I could also move to a new tag scheme easily if I ever need to.

Hope some of that is useful.

why would you use EAC to rip to WAV, when you can use it to directly rip to FLAC or whatever?

Also check out www.sonos.com.

Hmm.. why be a snob about some brands? I don't get it -- what kind of computer do you have? Custom job? You know sometimes parts don't always go together so well when you put it together yourself -- I had a friend who built a $3,000 computer that died in the first year. Yeah, I've had some dells that gave me less than 2 years, but the computer I'm typing this on now is a cheepey 5 year old dell, and it seems to be hanging in there just fine.

I understand dissing dell, hp, compaq for their dirt cheap models --yes, you're right they are junk. But really, are there many other options out there and available for average consumers (meaning, the sales outlets that most people tend to frequent)? Yes, I know there are some smaller brands out there that put together pretty nice parts in their systems for gamers and power geeks, but really, that's not practical for most people, so of course, they get a dell, hp, sony, etc.

If you get a high-end model dell, hp, sony etc., I bet 9 times out of 10 it will work fine and last a good long time. Pretty much everything you can get in hardware is going to be kinda junky anyhow, and even the finest parts (that dell and hp may or may not use) can fail on you too after a short term of use. Basically, no matter what you get, you can't expect these things to last forever. So what's the deal with picking on people who buy dell and compaq?

You're right, I could do that, and I've been considering doing that. I just haven't had time to play around with it yet. When I was using ATRAC, I had to rip to wave because you couldn't import FLAC into SonicStage (sony's music management software)

From a stereophile article on the transporter:

From their website:
What they mean is that it uses oversampling.
More from their website:


It's this kind of marketing gack that I take offense to. On the other hand, their products are great, and it's pretty tame compared to some others in the market.

KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) design:

Old 1.1Gig Athlon running XP. M Audio 2496 card, running Silver Juke, Currently all files are Monkey Audio compressed. Considering going to FLAC. Built system in smaller chassis with a "Quiet PC" power supply, stripped out all the other accoutrements and kept the system as light as possible. Isolated the mounting of the hard drives with felt to keep vibration translation to the computer case to a minimum. Added ziplock bags full of batting in the open voids of the chassis without inhibiting the cooling for further sound reduction. Will be shielding the 2496 card to keep noise down to a minimum (none noted now but it couldn't hurt).

Output of the 2496 is either through the onboard DAC to the analog outputs or out the SPDIF and through a Monica 2 DAC. Routing is chosen through software and all modes are supported by Silver Juke. This outputs to a 15 amp integrated tube amp through Athena FS2 speakers (pretty sensitive). At a third volume on the amp it will be loud enough to drive you out of the room!

All ripping was done through EAC, running simultaneously on the Music Server and the new desktop. The ripping on the old computer was very slow compared to the new desktop (a 64 bit machine running 32 bit code)

The "Music Server" is mostly stand-alone, I do not have it connected to the internet unless I drag the ethernet cable out and plug it in for software upgrades and downloading tags or album art.

Went with Silver Juke due to the fact that a technically "challenged " individual would be using the system as well. I like Foobar but do not have the time nor patience to get it set up to something that all could utilize.

Overall the system works and sounds great!

I didn't know about slim devices. Those look wicked thanks :-)

Now to save up some moola

@firekat

I saw an interesting howto in Maximum PC a few months ago for limiting hard drive noise. They suspended the hdd using rubber bands to hold it in the drive slot. It looked extremely stable to me, but probably would need replacing after a few years, but still eliminates all amplifying of drive noise by the contacts to the metal case.

Try it out, its pretty cool.

~Chad

I'll have to check that out, right now the felt strips are working pretty good.