[adydula]

Hi,

Your scenario is very much what I have gone thru recently.

600 or so cds etc...

Enticed by the efficiency of digitizing, having the ability to select any song very quickly but having no real loss of audio quality in comparison to the source. In this case a cd being played in a very good CD player with great electronics , dacs etc.

So I first paiinfully ripped all my cd's to FLAC format. Went thru that learning process.
Then tried a Logitech Squeezebox Touch, with an external USB drive attached and it worked but the display being near the audio equipment never worked out well for me. I dont want another pc on etc...

So I got a laptop pc with HDMI out. I loaded all my flacs onto it. Its only a 1.3ghz cpu, with 250gb hard drive. WIN7. I discovered that I could attach a ethernet cable from this laptop to the Oppo BD83SE cd player and send transcoded FLACS from the laptop to the Oppo....the transcoding done in the laptop takes the flac back to the original redbook cd format and the Oppo plays this...I could NOT tell any real world difference between this and the cd playing from the Oppo.

I used a 58" plasma screen to display the Oppos' DLNA display it all worked but required lots of devices to be on etc...

Lastly I discovered the new HRT Music Streamer ii, asynchronous USB DAC.

Voila, same laptop, no ethernet, no DLNA, no OPPO....just Winamp playing flacs to the USB DAC....still use the 58" plasma for Winamp display, use remote usb wireless keyboard from IOMEGA....the output of the DAC goes to the preamp and out to the amp and speakers....many AB comparisons again no real world differences in this Winamp Flac to Usb combination to a cd playing in the CD player.

Wonderful, simple setup and very fast...the laptop has wireless on it all the time, I notice no performance or skips etc...if so I would just turn it off. Also the laptop makes very little noise...really dont know its there.

I am very pc literate, have built many, many pc's...this works well for me.

Good Luck!
Alex

[nyc_paramedic]

I'm beginning to think about building a dedicated, stand alone, music pc to feed Lossless audio files to my 2 channel system...

I thought about posting this on the "Dead silent dedicated Linux music server for USB DAC's." thread, but since I want more than a streaming music server, I decided not to...

You can do more than a streaming box with Voyage Linux, MPD and Alix. And thre are other options as well using Voyage Linux, MPD and other embedded style boards.

Some ideas:

Usin an Alix 1d mini-itx (http://pcengines.ch/alix1d.htm) as the base hardware with Voyage MPD, you can come up withe several variations:

1. Add a mini-PCI wireless card; board has one mini-PCI slot. Add PCI SATA card and SATA disc(s). Use on board USB to feed USB DAC.

2. Add Linux supported 3.3 volt PCI card (e.g., ESI Juli@); add mini-PCI wireless; use 44 pin IDE to SATA adapter and add SATA disc; use Juli@'s S/PDIF to feed DAC or its analog out to preamp.

But you don't have to stick with Alix hardware as Voyage Linux/MPD has target installs for generic x86 motherboards.

You could use any low power motherboard to put together a silent Vpyage MPD box outputting to a USB DAC or PCI audio.

Some decent boards:

http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-D945GSEJT-Mini-ITX-Motherboard This one only need a single 12 volt power supply thus allowing you to experiment with batteries or linear supplies of your choice.

Or, you get a bit more technical and use an industrial board: http://www.logicsupply.com/products/keex_2030 This is also fed with a single 12 volt supply.




Cheers.

[jeffh]

Why not try using Vortex Box http://vortexbox.org/. It will serve up and store all your files. MPoD on an iPhone or a MPD client on another PC can control it. And best of all it is free.  Find an old PC and give it a test run.  It cost nothing but your time.

[chip]

Why not try using Vortex Box http://vortexbox.org/. It will serve up and store all your files. MPoD on an iPhone or a MPD client on another PC can control it. And best of all it is free.  Find an old PC and give it a test run.  It cost nothing but your time.

If you don't have a spare PC use virtualbox on a current PC and setup Vortexbox to see it in action.