We've had the computer-as-jukebox in the living room for two years now, and as of last week it sounded practically as good as my analog audio sources. It took a lot of work to get there.
This information is certainly find-able elsewhere: the
Computer Audio at Audio Asylum, and the
Mac Audio Setup Tips at Empirical Audio were particularly helpful to me in the final stages of this quest. Since Vinnie has had lots of fun recently with providing wonderful computer audio source mods, I thought that my journey might be of interest to the Red Wine crowd.
No matter how much I've been prodded, I have not yet gone the Squeezebox route: I use a Macintosh Mini with a USB audio interface, sitting right next to the (Red-Wine Modded!) Teac amplifier. The computer is video as well as audio. I have yet to find anything that streams video and audio effectively, and in any event any such media box is about the size of a Mac Mini anyway: the Mac is really small and quiet. It works.
I've held off on upgrading the DAC... basically I'm confused about the best way to proceed. With the tweaks noted here, the current setup is such an improvement over that of just two months ago that I'm sitting back and enjoying the music!
1. Red Wine Teac
2. Red Wine interconnect Cables -- these were the last thing I added, and made a HUGE difference.
3. I upgraded the Mac to OS X 10.4.2, this might improve latency of audio applications, I am not certain. The software I'm using to edit Vinyl recordings takes advantage of 10.4 CoreAudio improvements.
4. I got the banana connectors so I can use my big speaker cable again.
5. I found an application called "Audio and MIDI Setup" in /Applications/Utilities that *finally* let me upsample to run the Edirol UA-5 USB DAC at 24-bit/96 KHz reliably. This made a relatively big difference.
6. I bought a larger hard disk, I'm re-importing the CDs as Apple Lossless rather than 320 KB/s AAC... and SACD or vinyl (both analog sources) as 96 KHz/24-bit AIFF.
7. I re-set the iTunes library to completely blow away the "Sound Check Level Normalization" or whatever its called -- this was *clipping* most dynamic (classical) music. That sounded *awful* for a long time, I finally figured out how to banish it.
8. I turned off the EQ in iTunes.
9. I turned off the chiller on our house. Temperature dropped enough last week to live without it: we can survive for about six more weeks before getting the wood stove fired up. I hope. Anyway there are some advantages to living in a one-big-room adobe cottage in the desert... now if I could get rid of the refrigerator noise...
I'm listening to Lyle Lovett ripped at 320 KB/s AAC, and it sounds *amazing*.
The things that mattered most, in approximate order of impact: 7, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 6
I couldn't turn off the EQ until these interconnect cables were added to the mix. Now I've got a sound that I want to run out and share with people! And we're at maybe the 18th hour of the Teac...
Up until last week, I had really wondered about this years-long experiment in iTunes as a music source. Now I'm convinced: there is the same about of tuning needed as with vinyl, to get all the pieces to play nice.
But the computer as audio source is here to stay. No question.
