Building a Media PC has opened a big can of worms in terms of figuring out the best way to acquire, store and interact with video and music. So far, I'm largely ignoring the video side of the problem and concentrating on music.
As I mentioned before, the audio out of the VIA SP 13000 simply wasn't good enough and being a geek and an audiophile kinda guy led me to taking a deep look at getting a good analogue signal out of a computer. That quickly led to the core issue of digital to analog conversion chips (DACs) and I ran into this great list of the DAC's used in various bits of HiFi gear.
In general, it's always Burr-Brown (by Texas Instruments) that gets respect in audio circles. I don't know why but they have the best reputation. Anyway, if it's good enough for Mark Levinson, it's good enough for me! A DAC with a Burr-Brown chip is a good start.
A DAC is a lot more than just the conversion chip. It's the quality power supply, components and circuits that are wrapped around it too. Looking further afield, I discovered groups designing and building their own DAC's. The PCM 2702/2902 Burr-Brown chip is popular for this. This approach has quite a bit of appeal to me since you can assemble a piece of kit that would cost many times the cost of the components. It's a challenge but a bit OTT.
It makes sense to keep the DAC external to the PC with it's own clean power supply. Connectivity should be firewire or USB. Ideally, you also want ASIO drivers so that you have the option to upsample to 24 bits on the PC beforehand and avoid the Windows XP Kmixer. This turns out to be easy with the ASIO4ALL driver.
So I started looking for audiophile USB DAC's. There's a huge range. Check out the high-end DAC from Wavelength. The bottom line is that you can spend anywhere from £50 to £1500 on a DAC and it's really hard to figure out when to say enough is enough! All the devices are from small players so it's not like you can easily A/B them all. Or you can go the pro audio route with top DAC's coming from Apogee or Swissonic.
It's a nightmare.
To cut a long story short, I eventually decided on a completely different solution. I ordered a SqueezeBox from Slim Devices after reading lots of good stuff about it. But instead of settling for a stock SqueezeBox, I'm getting a modded version from Red Wine Audio. I'm just getting the basic mods with an upgraded DAC chip but without the wife unfriendly external battery. I'll replace the switching power supply with a regulated linear power supply instead.
I wasn't going to go the network player route but I've changed my mind. Why?
- It's a neat wife-friendly "one box in the living room" solution
- Even the kids will be able to use it
- The server software is functional, open source and runs on anything
- There's a good community around Slim Devices and the server software
- It supports a lot of different codecs but it's native format is FLAC
- There's quite a few audiophiles raving about how it sounds
- You can always add an external DAC to make it sound better
- At worst, it's an Internet radio and SuperG bridge
- It's not very expensive
I've tested out the SlimServer software with the Java SoftSqueeze player and while not particularly slick, it seems functional enough that I could live with it and I'm sure it will get better. The modded SqueezeBox should arrive in January and I'll find out whether it lives up to the hype. Meanwhile, I have to get a lossless music library together.