LeeW Posted December 3, 2006 Share Posted December 3, 2006 I would like to hear the pros and cons from owners of the media servers mentioned above. Thanks, Lee Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tigerwoodKhorns Posted December 4, 2006 Share Posted December 4, 2006 Check out the thread "HTPC Why did I wait so long" in the HT forum. You will get way more for way less. Worth a look. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LeeW Posted December 4, 2006 Author Share Posted December 4, 2006 Thanks, I'll take a look Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rivendell61 Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 Based on the little knowledge I have of those--if I was looking for a 'convenience' server solution....I'd get the Cambridge Audio 640H. If you were willing to spend a bit more energy you could have a SOTA hard drive system for about the price of the 640 by buying the cheapest Dell (c.$350) and adding/configuring a few bits. Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LeeW Posted December 5, 2006 Author Share Posted December 5, 2006 Mark, After briefly reading through the "HTPC" thread that TWK pointed out I'm starting to lean in that direction. I'm going to use it with a DAC and would like to have some sort of onscreen interaction maybe with a wireless keybord. Any suggestions as far as hardware and software to add would be very helpful. Thanks, Lee Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NOSValves Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 Lee, I use a cobbled up old PC with a good quality soundcard and buffer in my shop for listening while working on gear. It is by no means optimal at this time in the sound quality department yet, but I absolutely believe for digital listening with the right output devices a music server can be made to rival all but the very best CD players and have ton more convienence. Craig Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NOSValves Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 Rivendell61, How you doing? We need to chat sometime and catch up. Shoot me an email when you have time to chat! It has been way to long. Craig Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest " " Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 I went to the site to check the Azur....a lot of these share the same architecture and I wanted to see how the spec's compare to my old NAS-2.3, unfortunately, after being looped around the web site, I found no specs. Here are the specs to my NAS-2.3 By today's standards, the NAS-2.3 fall's short in its DAC processor which is only a 16 bit chip at 44khz. My recomendation would be to find out what type of DAC chip is being used in the media server. A state of the art platform should have a 24bit chip at 192khz NOS. NOS means the 192khz was not derived by over clocking a 96khz chip to 192khz. If you get a unit with a lessor quaility DAC, an external DAC's using a 24bit chip at 96khz are out there. If you have a modern HT reciever with a 24 bit 192khz chip, don't sweat the internal DAC issue if you are connecting via an optical or coax connection. NAS-2.3Network Audio Server Supported CD Formats CD-DA HDCD CD-R/RW DTS-CD CD-TEXT CD-EXTRA Capacity 80G or up to 1400 hours HDD Playback Recording Formats: - MP3 128 & 320 kb/s CBR; 192 kb/s VBR 44.1kHz/16bit Play By Album Play By Artist Play By Genre Play By Playlist Repeat Within-Track Search Playlist Sequential Playback Random Playback Of Playlists Random Play Of Artist Random Play Of Album Random Play Of Genre Random Play Of Playlist Audio/Video Audio Input - Analog In Optical Coaxial Audio Output - Analog Optical Coaxial Video - VGA DB15 x 1 Composite RCA x 1 S-Video 4 pin mini-din x 1 Connectivity IR Input 10/100 Base-T Ethernet 56kbps Modem RS232 Serial USB GraceNote CDDB2 XiVA Internet portal Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rivendell61 Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 Cambridge 640H specs: http://www.cambridgeaudio.com/specifications.php?PID=39&Title=Specifications And FYI: 192kHz DACs are not an indicator of quality, often quite the opposite. Some of the best DACs (Benchmark, Lavry) refuse to output at 192 sample rate because it actually degrades the signal. Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rivendell61 Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 Rivendell61, How you doing? We need to chat sometime and catch up. Shoot me an email when you have time to chat! It has been way to long. Craig Hi Craig! It's been a while because more than 3 minutes of consecutive free time only comes c. 3-4am. I'll e-mail you later today. Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest " " Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 Cambridge 640H specs: http://www.cambridgeaudio.com/specifications.php?PID=39&Title=Specifications And FYI: 192kHz DACs are not an indicator of quality, often quite the opposite. Some of the best DACs (Benchmark, Lavry) refuse to output at 192 sample rate because it actually degrades the signal. Mark I have found that in the cases where it is considered degraded, a 24/96 chip was used upsampled to 192 thru overclocking. Since DAC chips are sold in lots of 1000....it is expected that manufacturers justify their use of older 24bit /96khz or even 16bit /44khz chipsets until they exhaust their bulk supplies. btw, The Lavry DA10 can operate at 192KHz in "Wide" mode. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rivendell61 Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 After briefly reading through the "HTPC" thread that TWK pointed out I'm starting to lean in that direction. I'm going to use it with a DAC and would like to have some sort of onscreen interaction maybe with a wireless keybord. Any suggestions as far as hardware and software to add would be very helpful. Lee, There are so many options out there (which is good and bad) that it is hard to give useful suggestions. One way: A cheap Dell is a good base. Add a large second hard drive (internal) ala 300GB Seagate (will fit c. 800+ CDs at FLAC level 0 compression), c.$95. MusicXP web site( http://www.musicxp.net/ ) is good to guide how a PC should be set-up if dedicated to music (Tascam and others offer similar guides). Foobar2000 is an excellent, small footprint, totally customizable player/interface (but needs a day or two dedicated to figuring out/setting up!). Output from PC has many choices but easy and excellent is USB to a DAC. Apogee just lowered the price of the Mini-DAC to sub $800 and it has a USB input. Benchmark is maybe a bit better and another couple hundred (and need a USB/SPDIF converter). For ripping music onto the HD a Plextor 760 (IDE) internal optical drive is a nice choice (or, I think, 716 for external). The Plextor (comes with Plextools software) will rip into FLAC (good lossless compression algorithim) just as secure as EAC (Exact Audio Copy)--with error checking, etc. And you will want some external HD (or two), same size as the internal for back-up copies for when the internal drive self destructs. Wireless ideas: don't really know (I don't do it). Squeezebox is very popular. Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rivendell61 Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 Cambridge 640H specs: http://www.cambridgeaudio.com/specifications.php?PID=39&Title=Specifications And FYI: 192kHz DACs are not an indicator of quality, often quite the opposite. Some of the best DACs (Benchmark, Lavry) refuse to output at 192 sample rate because it actually degrades the signal. Mark I have found that in the cases where it is considered degraded, a 24/96 chip was used upsampled to 192 thru overclocking. Since DAC chips are sold in lots of 1000....it is expected that manufacturers justify their use of older 24bit /96khz or even 16bit /44khz chipsets until they exhaust their bulk supplies. btw, The Lavry DA10 can operate at 192KHz in "Wide" mode. No, it has nothing to do with chip availability, or quality (or 'chips' at all really since the same applies to discrete converters). I should have been more specific: it is inherent in the circuit architecture. Any DAC operating well at 192kHz will perform better (less distortion, noise...) at 96 kHz. 192 sells so we have lots of them and lots of cheerleaders--but a competent converter will give a more transparent signal at a lower speed. (And yes the DA-10 does 192--but that is the cheapest Lavry DAC aimed in part at consumers who think it is better. The top of the line Lavry 'Gold' does not. Nor does the Benchmark for the reasons I stated.) Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest " " Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 Rivendell61 It sounds better at 96khz because thats what it is, a 24 bit 96khz DAC. When over clocked to 192khz, the sound quality drops off, that why folks do not like 24 bit 96khz DACs that are enabled to run overclocked at 192khz. Different than running a 24 bit 192khz non oversampled DAC. I have a 192khz/24bit Wolfson DAC in my Onkyo TX-NR1000 and it does not sound better at 96khz than it does at 192khz, but then the Onkyo TX-NR1000 is a $4000 reciever. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rivendell61 Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 Rivendell61 It sounds better at 96khz because thats what it is, a 24 bit 96khz DAC. When over clocked to 192khz, the sound quality drops off, that why folks do not like 24 bit 96khz DACs that are enabled to run overclocked at 192khz. Different than running a 24 bit 192khz non oversampled DAC. Speakerfritz--my post above was speaking of 192 DACs. The Benchmark incorporates a 192 DAC (Analog Devices) but does not operate at 192 for the reasons I stated above (i.e., signal quality). Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest " " Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 Rivendell61 Sounds like there's some more work to be done until they resolve their implementation issues. I would stay clear of 192khz implementations that do not perform well and have to be switched down to 96khz. I have equipment with true 24bit /192khz DAC's as well as 24bit 96khz DACs that can run oversamped to 192khz, as well as 20bit DAC's and there is clearly a significant advantage to operating at 192khz non oversampled. The Onkyo TX-NR1000 has 7 independent DAC's, one for each channel, and sounds superior at 192khz than at 96khz. So I would not generically say that running at 96khz is better than running at 192khz. I can imagine that being the case if there's some implementation littations. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whamo Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 Hey, Just saving for future reference. Thanx for all the info all! Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jackpod Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 I built my own, I didn't skimp. The box also runs a suite called Cinemar mainlobby for a touchscreen GUI for my music, dvd's, XM Radio and my Home Automation system. A couple hints, Don't skimp. The box I built was about $1800.00 BUT it has 1.5 terabytes of storage, that is 1500 Gigabytes. It is on a raid 5 array, for those who don't know what raid 5 is, I can have a disk drive die, the system automatically swaps in a hot spare, and it can actually run one disk short if there should happen to be 2 disk drives that die at the same time without losing ANY data. There is a total of 8 250 GB sata II drives. It is a P4 3.4ghz with 4 gigs of ram and an M-Audio 1010LT sound card which supports 4 analog pairs and a digital out. I can easily stream 5 different audio sources simoustaneously with no effort. The digital feeds a McIntosh mac 3 DAC which feeds my C39 preamp. All of my music is stored in wav format, 1250+ CD's takes 600 GB and the 4 analog feed my Nuvo Essentia Whole House Audio system. The Cinemar Package along with J River Media Center has a nice GUI for the Music called MusicLobby, complete database for my DVD's called DVDLobby, able to send IR commands to whichever of the 3 400 disc changers I have along with satelite receiver control, TVLobby and XMLobby. Select a dvd on the screen and push play. Total cost for the Cinemar Suite is probably around $500 but it is in modules, you buy what you need. Programming isn't to hard, depending on how elaborate you want to get. Anyone wants a few more details, let me know Jack Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jackpod Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 Couple screen shots Musiclobby Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jackpod Posted December 5, 2006 Share Posted December 5, 2006 DVDLobby Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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