Dare I mention the 'Audiophiles' (3 Viewers)

[madad]

Crikey I hope I spelt that right.

I have a mate who's spent HEAPs of cash on his audio system, he looks straight down his nose at me when I talk about my media pc because let's face it, us PC ppl don't have a great rep for paying attention to audio (and video - 700Mb Divx cam anyone?) quality.

So here's my question: Is this possible from MP (or indeed a media pc at all!?)

- I want to be able to push my std 5.1/ac3/dts signal straight to my 5.1 amp for movies. vobs. tv. divx etc
- I ALSO want to be able to outboard my DA conversion, so it's not done inside a hothouse of interferance as we all know a PC is, for the "purest audio signal known to humanity" into some kick ass mono blocks. Oh yeah baby thats what I'm talking about (sorry, getting a bit excited)

And I'd like the music to go the outboard DAC route, with the movies going the std route to my crappy Pioneer amp.

Possible? Thought not. What about with 2 media pcs?

Is anyone doing this? I'd really like to combine the accessability of a media pc environment with the audiophile capabilities that we see in our (strangely less techno capable) friends' houses.

Otherwise tell me to shuddup and I'll just go watch another crappy divx and be happy. :sorry:

 

[grubi]

I think you have to live with it that some "Audiophiles" will look at you straight down their nose. However you should not care about them. If you connect you media pc via digital out (spdif or toslink) and do all DA conversion in you audio equipment imho you will barely hear any difference. Also important is that you do use kernel streaming for audio cd playback so that no resampling occurs and the singnal is send at 44.1 khz to the amp. When you connect any pc equipment to audio equipment via no-optical links you eventually have to care about different levels of groundig potential which could lead to noise.

I have a simliar setup and spent a lot of money in HT/adio equipment (some people buy a new car for that amount of money) and I'm really happy with the quality.

grubi.

 

[SciDoctor]

Very easily done.

I feed digital audio out through USB to dedicated MERIDIAN electronics, all upcoding and decoding is done here, sound quality on par with the best CD players I have tried .

Obviously codecs used and how welll you can steer the audio output is importrant but I have found most computer sound cards and their software cause more problems than they are worth, best avoided.

Error checking, dither etc is very well controled in the PC enviroment which is prety much what digial HFI audio mimics to such goood effect.

Active NAIM speakers in the cinema and QUAD Electrostatics in the MUSIC room (I still prefer vinyl LP for ultimate sound quality though)

MP does have rudimentary audio source selection for each plugin so look here for custom selection even though the MP remote mapping doesn't work well with multiple audio outputs when I last checked. Not realy an issue when your external control processor has its own remote.

MP runs on a centralised server, all audio and video feeds from here for the two main rooms, clients used in smaller rooms bedrooms etc.

 

[madad]

Cool response, thanks. I now realize why I'm so drawn to a community such as this. Can you please expand somewhat on your setup? IE Where can I get hold of Meridian USB equipment (I'm in New Zealand??)

 

[Lotsofjazz]

HTPC is THE route for Audiophiles to play digital music and video's perfectly!

Why? because AC3, DTS and DD 5.1 digital audiostreams can be send UNTOUCHED bit for bit to the Audiophiles D/A converter and amplifier, if you have a soundcard with digital output (S/PDIF). You need to set the codecs to send audio streams to the SPDIF, or set AC3/DTS/Mpeg Audio to SPDIF Passthrough, this makes sure no conversion takes place in your PC

I have it like this and I am very satisfied with the results.

BTW, it has just little to do with Mediaportal itself, you just have to make sure the codecs Mediaportal uses are set correctly. Any Media center PC should be able to work like this.

Lots

 

[SciDoctor]

Cool response, thanks. I now realize why I'm so drawn to a community such as this. Can you please expand somewhat on your setup? IE Where can I get hold of Meridian USB equipment (I'm in New Zealand??)

Any USB device designed for the oouput of audio will do , choose one which best suits your requirements.

 

[grubi]

Any USB device designed for the oouput of audio will do , choose one which best suits your requirements.

If you pass audio via digtal link to an external receiver it is most important that your soundcard supports real 44.1 khz output without resampling. Many of the devices available are not capable of doing this and are doing a 44.1 -> 96 -> 44.1 resampling which will lead to non-audiophile playback quality. You could check that by playing back a 44.1 khz DTS auido track. If you only hear noise and no music internal resampling took place.

grubi.

 

[Spragleknas]

Not an audiophile myself, but from readings I have done, it seems like using ASIO also improves things somewhat.

This can be done within MyMusic (see setup) and ASIO music player - MediaPortal Forum

 

[grubi]

Not an audiophile myself, but from readings I have done, it seems like using ASIO also improves things somewhat.

That's true. ASIO is one way to bypass kernel mixer which is responsible for resampling audio. Using kernel streaming is another one. One of the two is absolutely necessary for audiophile playback. So take care if you choose your sound device.


grubi.

 

[madad]

But coming back to my original question, would it be possible to switch outputs from inside mediaportal? So I could have a std 5.1 amp for my movies, and something separate for pure music signals? Say going into some monoblock amps?

So are there specific cards I can look for that support kernel streaming or is that completely handled inside the pc before going out through my spdif?