October 16, 2011
Added Make it Work A summary of the two sound cards I've tried and a write-up of the remote control system I use for my HTPCs so my Harmony remote can control multiple media player programs.
Update: September 16, 2011
I've re-built all of the PCs I use for media playback. The updated items are:
The results are proving to be quite nice. Basically, streaming HDTV and Bluray content over CAT 5 cable is now error free. TV recordings are now 99% error free. Also, I'm getting better results streaming HDTV over Powerline Adapters than I ever got using wireless N Bridges. Audio playback is as good as ever and video quality is fantastic as well.
Original builds here:
HTPC Clients - Bedroom System, Take Two
HTPC Clients - Main PC in Study
Network Throughput Considerations
Update: December 18, 2010
I started building my HTPCs around XBMC a media player software application with an excellent 10' user interface. Over the year I used it, the XBMC developers were hard at work trying to develop reliable video acceleration code. Two things happened; back in September 2010, the Dharma Beta releases were already out, and I was using an Asus Xonar DX sound card in my bedroom HTPC. Several glitches had appeared and most were dealt with (see the end of Bedroom System, Take Two above). With programs like XBMC, support happens in their forums. When I posted about the stutter when stopping playing audio files, I didn't receive a single response. This was very annoying and left me in somewhat low spirits regarding my choice to anchor my playback system on XBMC.
For a while I lived with the stutter until one day I realized that I would have returned (or thrown away) a CD player with an operating flaw like this. I finally got bugged enough to try something else.
I had read about J.River Media Center software (http://www.jriver.com/index.html) in several of the high-end PC audio sites I've visited and it was well received. The J.River MC software supports sound cards with ASIO based drivers. Using a little piece of software called ASIO4ALL (http://www.asio4all.com/) allows your PC to emulate the front end of an ASIO sound card driver and allows you to use J.River's ASIO output. The primary advantage of this is a direct data path from the source program's output to the sound card's hardware inputs. The data stream is not processed by Windows XP in any way, and only the output volume control from the device driver has any effect on the data stream. This allows the holy grail of bit-perfect playback in Windows XP. While I wasn't really seeking bit-perfect playback, I am always interested in accuracy, and it actually did make a difference.
I checked it out and found that:
Using ASIO4ALL to send the digital output stream from J.River MC directly to the sound card's hardware inputs bypasses all Windows audio handling software as well as most of the sound card driver's software.
This made a BIG difference in sound quality on the XP/Audigy machine in my study. The muddy bass I had always blamed on the Logitech Z560 preamp/head unit was actually happening somewhere in the Windows/Creative sound card driver software path. The audio is uniformly excellent now.
The J.River/ASIO4ALL combination eliminated all audio problems on the bedroom system with the Xonar DX card. No blats, ticks, farts or artifacts of any kind when starting, stopping, or pausing audio files, just correct behavior. Also, while less pronounced, there is an increase in audio quality on this system also.
I believe that the J.River MC/ASIO4ALL combination is a definite step up in audio quality for any machine. While subjective opinions are always to be taken with a grain of salt;
The bass clean-up was very obvious on the Creative machine
Music is more detailed (I'm noticing new things in my old favorites). I always take it as an improvement when I hear a detail that was previously masked.
While the bass was improved, it was not attenuated, spectral balance was maintained, with what sounds like a slight increase in midrange and treble tones. This is not off-putting, it adds to the clarity of the music for me and didn't sound tinny or strident.
J.River MC will run in a window, where it looks and behaves much like Windows Media Player.
J.River MC can be run in a full screen mode that yields a nice, usable 10' interface that is easy to control with a Windows MCE remote.
J.River MC can launch Total Media Theater 3 automatically for playing my Bluray Rips (TMT3 launches with the selected movie playing).
J.River MC can tag wave files. Yes, it actually can, by placing the tag information in an ID3 format at the end of the wave file. This tag may not be readable by anything but J.River's MC, but it's a real tag in the wave container if you're interested.
J.River MC can harvest the meta data from the directory and filename structure, or the tag, or a combination of both (which is the method I used to build my library). I now have my groupings by artist or genre back for my wave files and can simply select play all for hours of back-ground music.
The array of tagging and display options is amazing and bewildering. I'm just starting, but it appears you can make this program look and behave almost any way you can imagine.
Once you get used to the interface, the 10' display is very easy to use (hint; use the left/right arrow keys/remote buttons to navigate, the enter key/select button serve different purposes).
I paid the $50 for my copy back in September, and it's good enough that I'll happily pay another $100 for the two licenses I still need, the sound and interface are that good.
You can run a free trial for 30 days and J.River doesn't expect you to pay for additional licenses. Purchase one copy and you can install it on as many machines as you wish.
ASIO4ALL is a free, tiny, and completely benign program. It doesn't even run until you play a song or a movie in MC, and it closes when playback is stopped. It doesn't load or mess with any codecs. Even while MC is playing something, other programs can access the sound card driver like ASIO4ALL isn't there at all.
What's really nice about this is that MC has a digital signal processor built in, seven clicks in one dialog box turns off all extraneous processing, or you can use it as you see fit. Sound Field Effects, Sub Output (complete high & low pass filters), EQ, Crossfeed (for headphone listening), Room Correction, Tempo & Pitch, & Volume Leveling are available.
If you have any issues, or just want to see if a direct digital path from the program to the sound card makes a difference, a trial won't cost you anything and I recommend you try it. If you aren't using a direct path solution on your PC, you may be as pleasantly surprised as I was.
http://www.jriver.com/index.html
Completed between September 2009 and February 2010
I realize it's a bit odd to to be posting in depth about the ultimate digital component, a PC, as a project in a web site about analog electronics and speakers, but I've found that over the past eight years I have quit using all other types of individual sources (CD players etc.). I have ripped all of my CDs and DVDs to a server and play them using PCs located at my systems. Now I can listen to internet or FM radio, a large audio jukebox, watch DVDs, live or recorded HDTV, or Bluray movies at any of my three systems. All of my content is available anywhere in my apartment. Even my little laptop acts like a portable TV now.
Last year my main PC (in my study) died. I decided during the rebuild to move some of the things I did with it (TV recording and data storage) to a server. While using my main PC as a personal video recorder wasn't causing problems, I found the occasional reboot problematic when recording, and it just made sense to move to a real server/client architecture in my home network. Suddenly, from September 2009 to the end of February 2010, I found myself rebuilding my main PC, building a Windows Home Server and a HTPC for my bedroom system. As usual, it takes me several weeks to get up to speed on current PC components. While I'm interested in PCs and build my own, I don't follow the news on the "newest and hottest" components like I do with speaker building. Every two to four years, when it's time to upgrade or something breaks I find a whole new world out there. It also took a few weeks to find the software I needed for music, DVD and Bluray playback. While there's tons of stuff out there, something with a 10' user interface (that an old guy like me can read from across the room), amendable to remote control operation, and works well wasn't as easy to find.
While these PC sources aren't going to produce audiophile grade sound (I'm pretty sure that takes a turntable weighing at least 100 pounds and costing many thousands of dollars, or a CD player of the same cost/weight standards), I find that they are all good for casual listening. Most of the Internet Radio stations I listen to outperform the best FM radio stations by orders of magnitude. With a careful choice of sound card, it is possible to build a very nice high fidelity sound source for my critical listening pleasure. A PC equipped with a high quality sound card, playing an uncompressed CD rip is capable of excellent playback. With a high quality sound card's analog outputs connected to a good amp, you will hear (not hear?) a dead quiet background, and dynamic, uncolored sound. While some of the great CD players out there will outperform a PC with a good sound card, many won't.
I started ripping my CD collection at 320 kb/second stream rates back in 2002, but hard drive space is so cheap now that I rip them as uncompressed waves. This excludes the library functions of the player software I use because I haven't found a way to tag the wave files. Even without library functions, I now find myself enjoying listening sessions (what most would consider critical listening) at my main computer system. The sound quality is good indeed.
As an experiment, I tried the analog outputs from the integrated sound chip on the motherboard of my bedroom PC. The performance is good, not just acceptable, but actually good. Most surprising to me was a noise floor low enough to encourage fairly loud playback. If I turn the system up with nothing playing, I'll get to 3/4 of it's maximum volume setting before I hear a faint hiss. I find that if can hear any noise during a silent portion of a program at any playback level, I'll be bothered to the point that I'll turn it down and eventually replace the offending component, and this very simple solution passes that test. Oh, and it also sounds good. My other system, in my office, is where I experiment the most. I use an old Audigy Platinum card that produces very clean, undistorted sound. With good pre and power amps and decent cables, it is noise free at high volume and produces no more noise at maximum gain setting than a good audio system consisting of individual components would.
At this point, the only individual source components I have are TVs, FM radio receivers, and occasionally, I'll play an LP on the big system in my living room. My bedroom system consists of a Yamaha receiver and a very simple HTPC, connected to my network through a Netgear wireless N bridge. The big system in my living room is mostly just left over stuff. It's my real project and hasn't rally been started yet.