Respected audio guru Wes Phillips reviews the Linn Klimax DS network music player in the current March Stereophile magazine. It streams 124KHz 24 bit music to a hardwired home music network. If you can afford the $20,000 price tag (even money, no $19,999.99 bait-and-switch here) then you can probably also afford to hire an outside shop to rip your entire CD library to proprietary FLAC digital audio files, which you can then route through the whole house on a state of the art proprietary software platform.
If that’s too rich for your blood, there’s the $6,000McIntosh MS750 music server, reviewed by Phillips in the January issue. Phillips notes that some audiophiles have attempted to duplicate this functionality on home PC’s. I believe his phrase was “on the cheap”.
The image at the top of this article shows the Silverstone on the top left of the rack. Black cases photograph poorly. But it’s my $2,000 solution.
It seems the audio industry is starting to pay attention to audio technologies that were already available for Mac and PC in 1997. I’ve posted my articles Music Server, Music PC in Living Room Stereo (2006-2007) and Home Sound Studio (1998), describing most of the information you need to know.
My System
My system isn’t designed to “stream” audio, though it could – inter-connectivity is 100% Ethernet. It plays lossless WAVE files. I use the superlative free iTunes software to manage almost 200GB of classical and “pop” music. I rip music in the computer room, where I spend much of my time. To play in the living room, I synchronize a 300GB hard drive via Ethernet with a similarly built machine in the living room. I’m listening to Yo-Yo Ma “Cello Suites” (Sony, 1997) at the moment. In my many aural A/B comparisons, I can’t detect any differencein audio depth or quality between the original CD and the ripped file, even on the Klipschorns in Phoenix. Digital audio is digital audio. If you are as good as the original CD, you can’t get better.
All this theory falls apart if you are using “cheap” PC equipment. I have no doubt my technique would disappoint on an off-the-shelf Dell or Gateway out the door from Best Buy. But, if you own one of these machines, and it is modern (dual core, CPU 3000+), I can’t say what kind of audio processor the motherboard might offer onboard, but you can always buy a better-quality sound card. There should be no excuse for buffer underrun on a reasonably new machine, so you should still be OK, and this project might still be worthwhile for you.
Remember, I was playing stereo-quality music on a much simpler earlier-generation setup a decade ago. There just wasn’t enough bandwidth left to write articles about it at the same time.
Here in a nutshell is what I did to build my own system. Sparing no expense or cost overrun, and with the fancy Silverstone case, I managed to spend nearly $2000, but you should be able to do much better. If you are going to blow good money on a fancy PC case designed for home entertainment, take a look at the gorgeous $499 Zalman HD160 Plus Home Theatre PC Enclosure.
- Use a high end motherboard. I am using the ASUSM2N and A8N32SLI mobos.
- Look for the high end ReakTek/NVidia onboard audio processors, such as supplied with ASUS. These probably outperform low end audio cards such as Creative Labs Audigy, with a lot less drivers and things to crash.
- Use a dedicated, separate large HD exclusively for your audio library. I am using close to 2/3 of my 300GB drives. You can easily clone a dedicated drive for backup or transport.
- Use Apple iTunes to manage your growing audio library.
- Output your audio from the motherboard connector (green) to a standard stereo front end. I use a compact Denon in the computer room, and a mid-price Denon stereo receiver in the living room, but it can be any stereo amplifier you currently entrust to your very best music.
- Use the best speakers you can afford for the job, just as you do with your “regular” hi-fi.
- Buy an inexpensive A-B switch from Radio Shack so you can still pipe regular “PC sounds” through PC speakers when you are not listening to music. When all you want to do is hear the “PC Beep”, this just saves having to power the stereo on and switching it to your dedicated music server’s low-level AUX, TV, DVD or CDR connection.
- If you sync music files with a music player, or actually stream music, use Ethernet. You can NOT get the job done with wireless.
- If you want to play DVD’s on these systems, you need a DVD/CR player, and a DVD decoder. I purchased the NVidia PureVideo Gold decoderfor $29.99. So far, the highly compressed DVD audio is not up to snuff when compared to the original lossless sound track, but it still sounds pretty awesome on home entertainment speakers.
- Don’t forget to pipe your PC video (DVI or VGA) to your TV. Any modern TV has both inputs and a TV/PC input selector control. Most often, I run a slide show of my collection of digital and scanned home photos into the 36″ Samsung flat panel LCD. There is some stretching of the 1:1.5 image due to the wide screen format of modern TV’s. I have not figured out how to adjust my TV for that yet.
Conclusions:
All in all, I couldn’t be happier with my new setup. Due to the convenience of my vast iTunes library, I almost never play a vinyl LP or a CD. I can get home-theater quality audio out of my PC any time I want – no pressure to upgrade those ancient PC speakers.
Supposing you do have $100,000 to invest in a home entertainment system (I don’t), a $20,000 solution might sound attractive if it solves your audio delivery needs once and for all. It doesn’t.
Why would you want to invest that kind of money and time in a proprietary software system. and in proprietary audio file formats, that might not even be supported in 10 years?With lossless WAVE, and a hard-drive-based file management system based on Windows NTFS or Apple formats, you could start all over without re-recording if you had to. And what of the all-important playlist? Would you have to enter it all in by hand again? With Apple iTunes, the whole thing can be exported to XML. From there you can go to Oracle, mySQL, FileMaker, Access or anywhere you want to go.
You only have to get burned once with hundreds of hours invested in a dead-end file format. Yes, I can convert one or two Quicken 2003 files to Quicken 2007. I can’t reasonably do this with thousands of audio files, nor do I have a spare week or two to figure out how to accurately convert a playlist database format.
A standardized, off-the-shelf solution built with mainstream software and file protocols has much to recommend it. I can rip a CD with my system in a few minutes, at rip speeds of 16-27x, building the playless at the same time in iTunes without typing a thing. With over 4,000 songs in the database, this has still consumed (I’m guessing) over a hundred hours. I can be reasonably confident I’ll never have to do it again. Purchasers of the $6,000-$20,000 systems can not.
I may not own SACD disks or a player to handle them. My most expensive speakers were only $800 each (unfinished Klipschorns, in 1979). I know full well that there is a higher audio standard out there somewhere. But if you haven’t heard Waylon Jennings, E. Power Biggs, the Brandenburg Concertos or the awesome Powaqqattsi (Plillp Glass) on Klipschorns, maybe you don’t realize how much there is in the “old” standard.
Maybe there’s a reason why interest in the old vinyl LP is picking up again. The honest sound is there. In a Stereophilediscussion of the deteriorating sound quality of some current CD’s, I was horrified to learn that some of them use indiscriminant compression, almost like the MP3 files. Thus, even our source material isn’t lossless – the loss is already engineered in.
In the same discussion, mention was made of the awesome old direct-to-disc half-speed mastering recording technology, as exemplified by recording engineers like my half-brother Stan Ricker on the old Mobile Fidelity label. Yes, Virginia, you can really hear an astounding difference.
I’ve hard many friends comment they “can’t hear the difference” between compressed and lossless audio. It’s a fact – good compressed audio sounds good. But you can’t do this comparison by memory: “I heard the lossless version, and it didn’t sound any better” doesn’t hold water when you do a direct A/B comparison (switch back and forth between two reasonably synched recordings). You don’t have to have perfect pitch and golden ears to experience the depth of the difference.
For heaven’s sake, don’t degrade your music collection by recording it in a lossy format just to save on disk space. Why would you, when you can buy half a terabyte of storage for around $200?
My Music Server solution is probably one of those cases where “cheaper” really is “better”. Existing mainstream technologies plus better quality components in every link in the chain equal a lifetime of musical satisfaction.
