[*Scotty*]

It became obvious a little while ago that the only way for me to move forward on journey towards audio nirvana was to move to a different operating system with a different core audio engine. I didn't want to switch from XP to Vista and I didn't want to be a 7 early adopter. The Macintosh system comes with a very big price tag. That left an OS that appears to be overlooked by most of people in this hobby.
I chose to test drive the Ubuntu linux OS by creating a Ubuntu Live CD and booting from it. This allows one to try out Ubuntu without making any changes to your OS.
To cut to the chase, the included music player Rhythmbox  sounded startlingly better than JRiver unmapped or with  ASIO on XP. Every single aspect of playback was improved, all of the grundge between the instruments in the soundstage was eliminated. This results in a very large increase in the size of the soundstage with an accompanying improvement in holographic 3 dimensional depth layering.
In comparison XP has a flat soundstage and restricted dynamics with a large dose of grundge in the middle. Once I experienced the improvements from the Ubuntu OS
there was no going back to XP for music playback I purchased an ASUS eee1000He and loaded the ASUS eee specific version of Ubuntu on to it, eeebuntu.
It was a slick and inexpensive way to upgrade my system.
Scotty

[Scott F.]

Scotty,

Now that's interesting. Were you doing something like Foobar with ASIO on your XP machine (ASIO being the key element of the question)?

[richidoo]

Nice little PC
http://promos.asus.com/US/1000HE/ASUS/index.html

Can you post a link to the Ubuntu bootable build with media player that you first tried?
Thanks Scotty,
Rich

[*Scotty*]

I used foobar,mediamonkey and J River. Foobar 8.3 and JRiver were a virtually same mediamonkey was much less transparent. Asio was used on all players.
Here is a link to the eeebuntu site  http://www.eeebuntu.org/
link to ubuntu with rhythymbox player.   http://www.ubuntu.com/
Scotty

[jrebman]

Scotty,

Cool.  I just got an ALIX board the other day and after I put it all together will try it using either MPD or netjack feeding the USB stream into the Legato async converter and then to my Havana, and then using either windows or web-based client on a laptop to control the thing.  My understanding is that the linux box will be doing the heavy lifting but I'll have to look into the whole mess a bit further, but your results seem encouraging.

-- Jim

[genjamon]

Yeah, I've been using Ubuntu for almost a year now, and Ubuntu EEE on my Asus since I bought it last November.  I would agree it's a cleaner sound than what I ever got with XP, but I have to admit I miss the plug-and-play ease with XP.  It does take a little bit of work to learn some of the linux commands and operating system architecture if you have any troubles. 

As far as the Asus machine goes, I'm not sure I'd go with one again.  I've found the screen too small for good scrolling and such with Rhythmbox, and the keyboard is too small and shoddy to be useful for any word processing or other more intensive netbook work.  Also, the battery life has quickly degraded for me.  It's great for travel given size and weight, but I'd look around at all the netbook options before buying.

Still, Ubuntu is great in many ways, although I don't know if I could live with it as my primary computer for office needs and such.

My 2 cents,
Ben

[Carlman]

I've actually always wondered why people didn't do a Linux box for a pure audio-pc based system.  It has been on 'the list' for me to do for over a year.. but it takes time to master a new OS.  So, I haven't gotten to it.

I use my audio PC as a player only.  The music is queued from a mapped drive on the network.  That way I can have a tiny, quiet PC in the sound room and leave the big server in the office.

I have a friend using Ubuntu for a car audio PC also.. I might have to talk to him some more about it.

Thanks for checking it out.  I can't imagine how much better it could really sound.  I'm using a USB DAC now, though.. so I don't know if that makes a difference in the results of XP and Linux.

I don't doubt it could be better though.. and it makes sense... just a matter of time before I try it.

-C

[*Scotty*]

I think one of the keys to successful computer playback of sound files is an asynchronous USB connection if USB is used. I suspect the primary reason for the many reported instances of playback from hard drive not outperforming playback from a CD or DVD player can be attributed to jitter from the USB interface or player/core audio code that the player runs on top of. A key point to remember about a true step forward in more accurate playback is that it cannot be substantially better than the status quo without also sounding quite different from the status quo. As my playback from a computer source evolved I noticed steady move away from the sound I was use to from my CD player and a move toward a much higher level transparency and three dimensionality,so much so that in the case of many albums they are almost unrecognizable when compared to CD replay. I can now understand the comments from so many artists claiming that something went wrong when their master was turned into a CD and the CD does not sound like the master tape/file.

Scotty

[genjamon]

I'm curious what kind of asynchronous connection you have, Scotty.