CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[racerxnet]

Any one using the PC for audio playback. There has been great progress in sound quality from PC's over the last 2 years. This debate has been ongoing at Audiogon for some time and thought to ask this at a different forum/site.

What are you using for playback... software

What does your chain consist of... hardware

What did you use for comparison with equal output...

Which device sounded better..


Reference system #1

Software:
Foobar 8.3 ASIO drivers SSRC(secret rabbit code)
CD's ripped to .wav with EAC and tagged

Current Hardware:
Audiotrak 7.1 HiFI with ASIO driver
Fiberfin high density optical cable.
Genesis Digital Lens
MF Tri Vista 21 DAC 96/192
Bryston BP26 Pre
Bryston 4 x 7BSST monoblocks
Infinity RS1B's with crossover
Cardas IC's

PC was compared to Wadia, Sony, and Levinson CDP. I had 4 people over who did a blind A/B test without knowing which device was used for playback. All outputs were calibrated so that output was equal. Each unit was warmed up for 30 minutes prior to the test. All were plugged directly into the wall socket. No power conditioners were used nor were there any aftermarket power cables. Music selection was based on songs we were all familiar with, Davis/Coltrane-Melissa Ethridge-Eric Clapton. Disks were Redbook standard.

We had a great time comparing the transports to the PC, and everyone had a favorite based on personal preference. All were surprised at how well the PC sounded against the High end transports. Our favorite was the Wadia, which bested the PC in Holographcis, Space, air and dynamics overall.

No device had a clear cut advantage over the others. Details were minute, but discernalble. The test was to see if I could equal or better a STB for playback. I have since bought a Squeezbox and also modded the Audiotrak with a Superclock4. We all had high praise for the Digital lens in the path to help the PC output.

Best of all is that we had a blast.

We will be testing again as soon as the construction is done on the house and I will be using my other system for comparison.

Levinson Pre
Levinson 33h monoblocks
Genesis 200 speakers
Tri Vista DAC


MAK

[AFryia]

My answer may be a little off topic, but Yes.

HTPC with SPDIF out to the Pre-Amp (AVM30). AVM30 does all the decoding (5.1,DTS, etc). 99.9% movies, occasional DTS music CD. Sounds good enough to me.

Changing subjects I did briefly listen to some vinyl the other day. It was pretty sweet!

[Alaric]

Hi There,

Yes & No...

I've a slimserver with all of my CD's ripped to Flac's via Exact Audio Copy. The server is an old P3 machine running win2K for its sins, but it was picked up cheap and does fine with a 80GB hard drive for audio. Ripping took a few weeks a few cd's at a time when you were using one of the other PC's. It serves audio nicely for my squeezebox for multiroom audio and as a network audio drive for my HTPC.

Why bother reading from disc when you can have a guarenteed audio file that is bit perfect, EAC will use error correction if needed when ripping and does not have playback to constrain its performance, if it takes 5mins to rip a cd fine, if it takes 80mins to rip a cd, fine.

I then use winamp with a special asio plugin for my RME pro audio soundcard, I'm curently running a digi but want to upgrade to a hdsp one at some point. I use this for analogue out to my amp, a Yamaha z9

Full choice of all my CD's

cya,
Lee