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Post by John on Dec 11, 2016 7:06:12 GMT
After visiting my friend yesterday I am planning to get a PC built and use it mainly for audio playback I already have a tower pc that I mainly used but been stuck on BugHead 7.27 as it does not have AVX 2 and windows 10
It needs to have 16db ram at least I5 and use Skylake with USB slots. SD card reader and ideally fanless
With Bug head music uses ram to play the music file
Would it good to also have a dedicated USB card. Which one would people recommend
Is it worth getting solid state hard drive. Any recommendations
Anything else to consider
Would it also be worth going away from USB totally This would mean not being able to use BugHead For instance Tony server is fantastic but could not afford this route for another year
Maximum budget 1000
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Post by stanleyb on Dec 11, 2016 9:39:45 GMT
I have never quite understood why a desktop or tower PC would be a good choice as an audio playback device. I have been using laptops for that for more than 10 years now. I am also not convinced that you need 16GB of RAM for audio playback. What does make a difference is a more recent SSD drive and a fast processor. The main audible difference I could hear with the use of different processors is in the bass of FLAC files. The faster and more powerful processors deliver a far deeper bass when playing back FLAC.
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Post by John on Dec 11, 2016 9:52:40 GMT
It's because at this moment I will be using BugHead and it does a lot in ram to get the quality of sound it does
I am open to other methods' but they will need to have the same sound quality
The system will need to play wav
At present I do not know any other way to get the same sound quality at a reasonable cost
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Post by John on Dec 11, 2016 9:55:48 GMT
I do not want to go back to using disc as to get the sound quality I am after would be to expensive for me
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Post by Clive on Dec 11, 2016 11:17:44 GMT
As you know John I have a similar setup to our joint friend. It's an ASUS H110T motherboard. I went for a 960GB SSD as I can fit all my music on that, it cost me £170 extra vs taking a small system only SSD. I'd have needed another USB drive to play my music so going all SSD wasn't a expensive alternative in my case.
I also went with the the full 32GB of memory for BugHead.
I understand Stan's scepticism about a desktop sounding better than a laptop. I think though laptops are very noisy indeed so very polluting. My Skylake i5 fanless mini pc sounds tons better than my Ivy Bridge i5 laptop - this is with Foobar which doesn't use AVX2; with BugHead it's another world....with all the depth of vinyl.
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Post by pre65 on Dec 11, 2016 11:41:11 GMT
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Post by pre65 on Dec 11, 2016 11:59:09 GMT
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Post by Clive on Dec 11, 2016 12:02:00 GMT
That was the sort of price (£520) for the base vesion I had assembled: Skylake i5 with 32GB, mini case (fanless) with W10 Pro. When I added the 960GB SSD it came to £650.
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Post by Clive on Dec 11, 2016 12:09:15 GMT
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Post by John on Dec 11, 2016 12:36:52 GMT
Nice looking units
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Post by ChrisB on Dec 11, 2016 12:40:03 GMT
They look great.
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Juha
Rank: Soloist
Posts: 24 
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Post by Juha on Dec 11, 2016 13:01:27 GMT
I use a normal sized desktop computer. Currently 4 different internal sound cards.
Find a motherboard with 2 pci-e and 2 pci slots. Second hand pro soundcards are
not expensive. They all have slightly different sound. It is good fun to use many for
different music. It is like pickups for vinyl player.
Usb might be good, but pci expansion slots are even better!
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Post by MartinT on Dec 11, 2016 14:51:14 GMT
Choose the motherboard first, then a case for it. I would go for Samsung 950 NVMe SSD as a minimum, there is Windows 10 support for it. RAM is cheap. A Core i5 should be more than enough.
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Dec 11, 2016 15:27:10 GMT
Has anyone ever compared the sound quality of an "Audio PC" versus a Rasberry Pi or similar setup? Obviously, any comparison could consider built-in DACs and/or a common external DAC. I say this because Pi hardware is going to come in somewhere from say £75-£150ish
Cheers
Sean
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Post by AlanS on Dec 11, 2016 15:39:40 GMT
Has anyone ever compared the sound quality of an "Audio PC" versus a Rasberry Pi or similar setup? Obviously, any comparison could consider built-in DACs and/or a common external DAC. I say this because Pi hardware is going to come in somewhere from say £75-£150ish Cheers Sean He does want a PC, his friends have PCs. Don't mention Macs or Raspberry Pies I love my Pi with cheap DAC. It is so un tweakable |
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Post by Clive on Dec 11, 2016 15:57:44 GMT
I have an RPi3 with Digi+ which I can feed into my Metrum Musette DAC. Running an old version on BugHead on my Ivy Bridge i5 laptop I found the RPi to be close enough in SQ to not warrant my using BugHead. The latest version of BugHead using AVX2 instructions on my Skylake i5 miniPC is streets ahead of the older laptop version. The RPi is now consigned to my 2nd system.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
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Post by Deleted on Dec 11, 2016 16:26:35 GMT
I would suggest you try Roon John, for a market produced product it is very good indeed.
Bug head is good but too much faffing about and constant software updates.
Not going to go too much into detail here as we took over a dedicated streaming company here in the UK.
To Stan, why use a PC as a digital transport?
Simple answer please demonstrate a dedicated red book CD player that can match a well thought out and implemented ultra low power PC that can deliver red book (16/44.1Khz) files better than any dedicated player up to £15000 currently
If you really go into the nuts and bolts of a PC and rework the mother board extensively (better still have them produce to your specification)address the poor clocking issues, power supply interference etc, etc.
It took 10 years of constant revision to achieve the playback I now have today, which is a solid two orders of magnitude greater than your last encounter.
Data preservation and transfer are the greatest produces of real three dimensional, textured, natural sound quality.
However recently I have managed to achieve very close to 80% of the performance using an ARM processor a cut down version of my memory player with a neat GUI.Cost is around 1/8 of the price of the current reference playback rig.
Also have incorporated a word clock feature which has taken this to another level of realism.
Good luck with your builds chaps.
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Post by Clive on Dec 11, 2016 16:44:24 GMT
Currently Bug Head is not being updated, it's at 7.81 though 7.80 sounds better to some. The developer is taking a break, as he has done previously. I'm sure John will give his own thoughts....he knows Bug Head very well so understands the usability issues. Personally if I want background music I use Foobar, if I want to sit down to listen I use Bug Head. Interestingly Foobar on the Skylake i5 is pretty much as good as Bug Head was on my Ivy Bridge i5 laptop. There's massive difference from the days of 7.27 on Ivy Bridge to 7.80 on Skylake...massive...
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Post by John on Dec 11, 2016 16:57:00 GMT
There are a few issues with BugHead in terms of use
1 The loading time Even with Skylark about 20 seconds to before you can access files and then a further 30 seconds before sound. As Tony says a lot of faffing around so a simpiar approach with the same SQ or better would be great
2 The GUI is pretty basic
3 To use BugHead in its optinium performance you need a very capable PC
But sound quality makes up for these issues and as Clive pointed out has taken quite a few steps forward
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Dec 11, 2016 19:31:55 GMT
Thanks Clive, et al,
That was interesting to read
Cheers
Sean
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