Advantages of Music PC or HTPC over Laptops

[Rockfella]

• Intel i5 processor
• Gigabyte Motherboard (high end)
• 8 GB RAM
• 8 TB hard disk
• Windows 7
• Foobar
• ASIO

I am thinking of adding Jplay.

Cheers

Windows 8.1 and Jriver is a must

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

That's exactly what Microsoft wants you to think :lol: :lol: :lol:

 

[haisaikat]

Technology changes every moment, we should accept it.

well said:clapping: not sure if windows will be an exception in this regard over linux for music playback. Nevertheless I looked up over net and also went through some of the previous threads on this forum (Lets talk digital) and have decided to give RPi with Rune a try, will let every one know the outcome

 

[omishra]

I work into OS internals and file systems. I can confidently say that each PC OS upgrade has certain goals, may not be performance only. Sometime it fixes previous bugs, have different UI and support new hardware devices. But for data centre oriented Server Grade OS has definitely enhanced performance.

 

[Nikhil]

Now my question is-which system will give the highest return on investment in terms of sound quotient when you have limited budget for entire setup-(source+dac+amp+speaker+room treatment+misc).
Cheaper the soundcard or DAC,more will be the Jitter(noise). So it is not wise to invest in good DAC, rather than spending money on stealth(cabinate+motherborad+blah blah).

but laptop in question is, dedicated audio laptop, which has no software other than Foobar.No antivirus. No internet . Only windows.

...

So now question is-if above mentioned setup is compared to fully dedicated music PC, then what difference does it make in sound quotient. Means in good
revealing system, difference would be audible in case of my laptop??.

even if you spend lot of money on Music PC and spend less on DAC(good DAC less Jitter), then whole concept of music conversion from file format to analogue sound will get nullified IMO.
is there any difference between dedicated laptop for music(as mentioned above) and music PC in terms of SQ only not in terms of space and user friendliness.
Please give the comparison considering the laptop mentioned above only not normal daily use laptop with lot of software.

dheerajin,

FWIW, I have an old Dell D610 Latitude running as my Audio PC.
It used to be my old work laptop - created a new profile just for Audio.
Runs WinXP on an old Pentium board with 512MB RAM and a 30GB HDD.
It functions as a wifi receiver - receiving music over wifi from my Control PC.

I use JRiver MC 19 in client mode to handle the media and network sharing.
I have about 10 albums stored on a local library - but mostly it just renders music sent to it over wifi.
WinXP supports Kernel streaming which bypasses Windows and sends the data straight to my DAC (which becomes the sound card).

My experience has been that this old laptop has worked really well for its role. It would certainly not be able to handle library management duties.
However the real heavy lifting is done by my DAC. I would strongly recommend you to use the best DAC you can buy. It is the source.

What really made a tremendous improvement in Sound Quality in my setup was;

JRiver or any other media software to handle music.

Plugging the laptop into my APC board. This cleaned up the sound immensely.
Plugged into the normal wall socket the laptop was "chirpy" as heck.

Using a tweaked USB cable without the 5v wire.
I covered this in my USB tweak thread.

You definitely can use a simple laptop to play music. You will be surprised at the quality of a well thought out combination.

 

[dheerajin]

dheerajin,
bypasses Windows and sends the data straight to my DAC (which becomes the sound card).


However the real heavy lifting is done by my DAC. I would strongly recommend you to use the best DAC you can buy. It is the source.



Using a tweaked USB cable without the 5v wire.
I covered this in my USB tweak thread.

You definitely can use a simple laptop to play music. You will be surprised at the quality of a well thought out combination.

Hi Nikhil,
Thanks for sharing your exp/inputs.
I have been using Foobar and Wasapi add on ,to bypass the windows and the signal is directly sent to my DAC which is a descent DAC IMO.
I also have good experience with my setup till today. As per my question in original post and subsequent...my intention was to tell the people , who are building music PC spending exorbitant money and not spending much on DAC.
So was compelled to ask experienced FM that building music PC has some better advantages in terms of SQ compared to dedicated laptop with minimal configuration.
So far every one who has contributed in the thread has given their input and and largely it came in the favour of what you and me are saying.Only in terms of SQ not in user friendliness.

cheers

Dheeraj

 

[Nikhil]

Dheeraj,

There is no sure way to better sound. Budget constraints can restrict us as a DAC is a petty decent investment. Spending on optimizing a PC transport is also more accessible to many. Besides a HTPC also allows one to enjoy movies as well.

But yes to me the general requirements of audio are trivial for a PC.
Take care of a couple of basic issues and you are much better of spending your money on a good DAC.

Regards.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

There is no sure way to better sound.

This is so true, especially with computer audio. The trouble is that by the time we can see the results, we have spent the money already!

Nikhil, glad to hear of your old PC giving good service. As I have posted not more than a dozen times, I had less trouble with an old Pentium machine, way back, than I do with the powerful machines of today. Each upgrade of the sound card was an upgrade and I didn't have to worry about much else.

my intention was to tell the people , who are building music PC spending exorbitant money and not spending much on DAC.

Yep. Wrong priorities. The only expensive things about a music PC are the completely optional, mostly cosmetic things, like the case. Thing is, it is so hard to persuade people that more expensive is not better --- and that is probably even more true of us audio people. We like big price tags

 

[haisaikat]

and have decided to give RPi with Rune a try, will let every one know the outcome

Just wanted to share my initial impression with using Runeaudio on RPI.

First of all the setup was super smooth where I had to do nothing but burn the image on the memory card and that was enough, everything booted fine as expected. Literally zero configuration and even it detected my ODAC automatically as output device,

Next, the web UI provided is awesome be it desktop or mobile devices and the ease of use is fantastic, however if you refresh a library path that truncates the playlist and also only one playlist seemed to be supported which cannot be saved for backup (at least from UI). Moreover from the webUI you can also reboot and shutdown the RPI which I liked very much.

Now comes the experience on Sound Quality. Following are my observations
1. Default volume gain is a bit less as compared to what output I was used to getting from the PC initially, dont know if this is due to power supply (I am using a cheap 5V 3 Amp charger like power adapter) hence I had to crank up the volume on my amp more than what I generally do.
2. Sound stage was better in my opinion with the windows PC although I will make further experiments fiddling around with the settings (kernel profiles for runeaudio)
3. The highs seemed to be a bit flattened out, not sure why
4. The lows were just fine and so was the overall detailing

Somehow I am getting the feeling what someone said on this thread is right, although we do not need high end configuration for audio but we do need quality components even if it is overall a lower configuration. The RPI on this context is built to a cost hence not sure if that has anything to do with this difference.

It would be interesting though to test with linux on a dedicated PC although I might give a few other OS on RPI like volumio a try apart from playing with the runeaudio settings

 

[omishra]

Yep. Wrong priorities. The only expensive things about a music PC are the completely optional, mostly cosmetic things, like the case. Thing is, it is so hard to persuade people that more expensive is not better --- and that is probably even more true of us audio people. We like big price tags

Yes, completely agree, quality is required but not always with huge price tag. Some people discard the equipment if it cost cheaper because for many of them its prestige issue associated with there gadget.
So sound wise may be music PC is great but unnecessary. Laptop could match with hassle free usage and equal quality.

 

[mowgli80]

@haisaikat - I had the same problem (low volume) when I first connected odac to my linux box. The fix is to go the mixer and raise the volume levels for the dac to the maximum. I am not familiar with runeaudio interface but if you are comfortable with cli, alsamixer is the way to go.

 

[asliarun]

Hi Nikhil,
Thanks for sharing your exp/inputs.
I have been using Foobar and Wasapi add on ,to bypass the windows and the signal is directly sent to my DAC which is a descent DAC IMO.
I also have good experience with my setup till today. As per my question in original post and subsequent...my intention was to tell the people , who are building music PC spending exorbitant money and not spending much on DAC.
So was compelled to ask experienced FM that building music PC has some better advantages in terms of SQ compared to dedicated laptop with minimal configuration.
So far every one who has contributed in the thread has given their input and and largely it came in the favour of what you and me are saying.Only in terms of SQ not in user friendliness.

cheers

Dheeraj

I also wonder if the quality of transport depends on the ability of the DAC to be less or more fault tolerant. In other words, if the DAC is specifically designed to overcome input jitter, does it still make sense to be this particular about the quality of the input to the DAC (laptop vs music PC)?

I also say this because the DAC you have, Schiit Gungnir, specifically talks about this. To quote:

"So, whats all this about Adapticlock? Well, you probably know about jitter. And you probably know one of the best ways to kill it is with high-precision, voltage-controlled crystal oscillator (VCXO) reclocking. Now, thats all well and good, but what happens when you have a source that wont allow the VCXOs to lock? You know, like a satellite receiver or some computers? In other cases, youre toast. The VCXOs unlock, and jitter flows right through the system.

In Gungnir, if the VCXOs wont lock, it shifts the entire reclocking network to VCOs. This allows us to lock to virtually any input, and still provide a low-jitter regenerated master clock. The result is higher-quality clocks, despite the source."

It also has a "buy better gear" indicator that lights up when the DAC fails to lock in (fails to overcome the jitter). Is it reasonable to assume that if this light doesn't light up, your input doesn't really matter?

Again, quite possibly, other DACs may not be designed for something like this, so they might be less capable of overcoming jitter. Quite possibly, this might even be a conscious design choice in order to present a different music flavor.

 

[haisaikat]

@haisaikat - I had the same problem (low volume) when I first connected odac to my linux box. The fix is to go the mixer and raise the volume levels for the dac to the maximum. I am not familiar with runeaudio interface but if you are comfortable with cli, alsamixer is the way to go.

I am not that comfortable with linux CLI. Here are a few screenshots from my mobile of the Rune Audio UI and for the sake of convenience I will be keeping it and testing it for some more days. As you can see from the screenshots that volume is 100%, is it some different volume which you think can be boosted internally?

Well I also found this below article where it is being discussed that low CPU power of RPi may cause audio degradation if re-sampling has to be done and indeed many of my files are 44.1 KHz. May be this is a point to denote that we should have a low cost CPU but with some power at least.

RaspyFi/Volumio - Turn raspberry Pi into Audiophile audio Player - diyAudio

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

I am not that comfortable with linux CLI.

It's not so bad: this should be a one-off task and your system should remember the level. Your only contact with the command line is

$ alsamixer

The utility itself has a "graphic" user interface, albeit very rudimentary. Would you believe that, ,on installation, sometimes the level is set to "0" and it seems like nothing works!

I also found this below article where it is being discussed that low CPU power of RPi may cause audio degradation if re-sampling has to be done and indeed many of my files are 44.1 KHz. May be this is a point to denote that we should have a low cost CPU but with some power at least.

My viewpoint on this is... not to do software resampling!. It seems (ie, according to my browsing) that not all players.utilities/libraries do software resampling equally. It's just maths, isn't it? One would think so, but it is my experience that that stage can actually ruin the music, so I prefer to avoid it.

 

[haisaikat]

It's not so bad: this should be a one-off task and your system should remember the level. Your only contact with the command line is

$ alsamixer

The utility itself has a "graphic" user interface, albeit very rudimentary. Would you believe that, ,on installation, sometimes the level is set to "0" and it seems like nothing works!



My viewpoint on this is... not to do software resampling!. It seems (ie, according to my browsing) that not all players.utilities/libraries do software resampling equally. It's just maths, isn't it? One would think so, but it is my experience that that stage can actually ruin the music, so I prefer to avoid it.

Thanks for providing me the courage, will get down at it sometime

Regarding the second point, is there a way to find out if runeaudio or any player is doing it? How to avoid it? Is it by way of resampling the entire library beforehand and save as new files?

Will it be safe to assume that the ill effect of resampling will not ruin the audio if instead of a low capacity board we use a full fledged dedicated PC hardware?

All this time during this discussion I was getting the impression that if I use linux then there is no way I need to optimize the software platform part of it (by using dedicated Music-phile OS) like we have to on Windows.:sad:

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Disclosure: I am not a deep-level geek, despite some years as a Unix sysadmin. In fact, I have got rather bored with the techie thing and don't go there much unless I have to. Other members are much more uptodate on Linux.

I have two regular ways of playing music (and other audio) on my Linux system. One of them involves something called JACK, and the other has media players talking directly to ALSA.

With JACK, one specifies a sample rate at startup. If you play music sampled at any other rate, the media player must resample --- or you can stop JACK, set a different rate, and start it up again. For a long time, I was using a player called Aqualung, but, for that log time, I seldom had any content that was not 44.1kHz. When I started to acquire 96K music,I noticed that resampling (either way, up or down) was not good.

With my direct-to-ALSA routines, it is much simpler: I use a player called DeedBeef, and just select a hardware device that has something like direct, withno software resampling in its description. I also removed the resampler from the plug-ins.

Will it be safe to assume that the ill effect of resampling will not ruin the audio if instead of a low capacity board we use a full fledged dedicated PC hardware?

No. I don't think it is a factor of machine power. I am using a moderately-powerful general-purpose machine. I think it is a software thing, but it would take a great deal of research to establish what, why and how. There is resampling that works well. For instance, I have no means to play 192K music, so I use a CLI utility called sox to resample it to 96K files.

I was getting the impression that if I use linux then there is no way I need to optimize the software platform part of it (by using dedicated Music-phile OS) like we have to on Windows

Hmmm... If you use a proper audio-oriented distribution that has been put together properly, the optimisation, including some very deep stuff like IRQ balancing, will have been put in place for you. Your audio server should be set up already not to resample. A standard installation may need to play sound from many sources, eg desktop bleeps as well as music, and needs to mix and resample them to one sample rate to do that. Not only do we not want that, we want to avoid it, and your distribution maker should have seen to that.

You shouldn't have to worry about more unless you experience problems. However, I am not saying that Linux is necessarily a problem-free environment. For starters, USB hardware compatibility can still be a problem, which it almost never is with Windows, because stuff is designed and sold to work, for better or worse, with Windows. It always takes at least a quick google to be sure, if the manufacturer does not state it.

 

[haisaikat]

Okay guys so I went to alsamixer from runeaudio console and it indeed had a UI to increase the volume by using the cursor (arrow) keys. I found the current value at 32, increased it to 100 and played back. Wonder!!! the volume is back and more importantly the previous problems with the highs is also gone now. Seems most likely that it was either due to software volume control in alsa or due to the fact that for same output gain what I am getting at 11 o'clock position of amp volume control was being realized at around 3 o'clock position. And I read elsewhere that with increase of volume the amp characteristics might change.

Nevertheless I am very happy with the output now, not sure if any better (more linear ) power supply will improve this further or may be even some DC power banks.

Now coming back to the resampling part, if the software detects that DAC supports a particular sample rate(s) it will not resample correct? Is there a way to find out if the software is indeed doing resampling for a particular file?

I any case, thanks guys for helping me out and suggesting this setup. As it has zero investment cost for me, I am going to keep it for some more long and if the upcoming 0.3 version turns out to be good, I will very well keep it for dedicated music listening.