The Ideal Audio PC

[Black Sand Cable]

I looked at going this route and after not only hearing the PS3 but also feeling how much heat it gave off, I went back to the PC option and built a PC made up of this:

Cooler Master Cosmos case
Ultra X3 Modular 800-Watt Power Supply
XFX nForce 680i LT SLI Motherboard
XFX GeForce 8800GT Alpha Dog Edition Video card X 2 Running in SLI
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processor
Corsair XMS2 DHX 2048MB Dual Channel PC6400 DDR2 800MHz - 4 in total
Auzen X-FI Prelude 7.1 soundcard
Seagate Barracuda ES 500GB - 4 in total (I have yet to decide on a RAID option)
LG Dual Blue Ray / HD DVD player / burner

At the end of the day, this thing is smoking fast, dead quite and plays everything that I throw it! The Auzen sound card is also a heck of a lot better than I was expecting. They recently did an update for this card that added Dolby Digital Live which is very cool to say the least. When I'm surfing the net or doing whatever the card outputs everything in DDL which is very cool.

I even went so far as to A/B the LG against my Oppo DV-981HD and there was no difference. The LG is being output via DVI through the 8800 and the Oppo was going direct via HDMI. The picture was identical which is a testament to how far video cards have come.

If I had to do it over again I would not change a thing except for maybe the case. It's a great case but she is big and that is putting it mildly. 

[Black Sand Cable]

and yes before anybody asks, I'm a bit of a closet computer geek! 

[richidoo]

... closet computer geek! 

John consider this your "Coming out..."   
The puter sounds cool. Are you running Media Center?
Rich

[Black Sand Cable]

... closet computer geek! 

John consider this your "Coming out..."   
The puter sounds cool. Are you running Media Center?
Rich

At the moment I'm using Vista Ultimate 64bit which has Media Center built in but I'm not positive on if I will be staying with it or not. I may go back to XP Pro 64bit. If Microsoft had released a version of XP Media 2005 in 64bit I would have just installed that and skipped Vista all together.

Vista as I'm sure everybody knows is still buggy and the 64bit editions are even worse. It's getting better as I can now at least get 64bit drivers for everything, but the operating system itself is still a long way from being any good. I did a clean install of XP Pro 64bit when I first built the computer and took some benchmarks. I then did a clean install of Vista Ultimate 64bit and ran the same benchmarks. I lost an average of 15% in overall performance. I'm slowly tweaking things and I'm getting some of that back but to me at least, it's a joke what Vista does to an otherwise fast computer. When I had XP installed I could burn a DVD, have WinAmp running (yes WinAmp.....I'm not a Foobar2000 guy), surf the web and about a dozen other things all at the same time and the computer handled it. Now I'm lucky if I can do half that before I start to get errors.

[mca]

LG Dual Blue Ray / HD DVD player / burner

Can you tell me what the model number of this drive is?

[richidoo]

I'm constantly amazed at how MS can f**k things up so effortlessly and so often. You'd think they could just test it first. Or maybe know what the market wants and needs. This is what they did with win95 and it worked, everyone loved it and it made a lot of money. The 'win95' mentality remains while all the visionary innovators are gone, replaced by a bunch of hack coder kids. There must be a lot of "gotta print something new to keep my job" thinking going on internally, along with a healthy dose of "we need a reason to sell more licenses to our corporate hostages." I bought MSFT close to dead bottom at $25 and waited for 5 years for it to move before dumping it. They are a creative has-been, and will continue to melt away, but a glacier takes a long time to melt. Ooooooh a RANT! I didn't even notice!! haha

Keep your chin up John, sounds like it is still a screamer by my standards. You would go insane waiting for my slow computers and NAS to respond. Are you satisfied that the Vista audio central is not messing with your playback? I know there is workaround, can't remember exact details. Sounds like you are on top of that.

[Black Sand Cable]

LG Dual Blue Ray / HD DVD player / burner

Can you tell me what the model number of this drive is?

LG GGC-H20L BLU-RAY HD-DVD Reader BD-ROM 6X HD DVD-ROM 3X DVD+-RW 16X8X6 DL 4X Black SATA

[Black Sand Cable]

Are you satisfied that the Vista audio central is not messing with your playback? I know there is workaround, can't remember exact details. Sounds like you are on top of that.

I have no issues at all with sound I get out of this box. The Auzen is hands down the best sound card that I have owned and I have owned most of them.

As far as Vista hurting the audio side of things, I think it's been blown out of proportion. I have heard very little difference (if any) between XP and Vista.

[Carlman]

Now we're pretty far off the Sony Playstation thing... and bringing up stuff I wouldn't mind discussing... hmm.  I'm going to move the last few posts to a new thread and start talking about the ideal audio PC...

In my experience, Vista definitely sounded a little 'smoothed over' compared to XP, the way I had them configured.  Keep in mind I have a high sensitivity to digital differences... not just overall sound quality..

I will compare Vista to XP to the Playstation as soon as I get the room finished... man, I'm tired of saying that... but the room, the ROOM... it consumes me!!! BTW, HVAC is installed... framers come Monday.

-C

[dweekie]

http://www.imageevent.com/cics

This is an interesting concept for computer transports.  I think it is pretty extreme for somebody that actually uses the computer for normal uses, but some elements are pretty good.  It's a fun read at the very least.

I have the X-Meridian (predecessor to the X-Fi) and it is fantastic.  I've swapped the opamp to the same one found in the X-FI and have tried various cap upgrades.  The most interesting option is to bypass the on-board AK4396 output filter with a passive output.  This would be identical to the popular Behringer 2496 active crossover mod.  For some reason, it has not been used much soundcard modders.  Of course it appears you are using the digital output so this mod wouldn't matter so much......

And of course the gray area question: Have you found different power cords affect the sonic performance of a PC?

[Black Sand Cable]

And of course the gray area question: Have you found different power cords affect the sonic performance of a PC?

Yes.

I currently run the computer into an Equi=Tech 1.5RQ via a Violet Z1 that is terminated with Oyaide's 004's and the combo works well. When I pull the Equi=Tech and the cord from the mix, the first thing that goes wrong is that my noise floor goes through the roof. With the two in place, I'm dead quite.

[Carlman]

I think the power supply of the PC might be pushing grunge back into your line, thereby polluting other pieces... I think isolating the PC or anything with a switching/otherwise noisy power supply is the key.
-C

[Dougie085]

I was going to say before you said your a computer geek that 800 watts is way over kill for that PC And if your just using for music not sure you'd need an 8800gt.

[Black Sand Cable]

I was going to say before you said your a computer geek that 800 watts is way over kill for that PC And if your just using for music not sure you'd need an 8800gt.

I'm actually running 2 - 8800's in SLI and thus needed a little more juice. I do use the computer from time to time to watch the odd movie also.

[Dougie085]

...dual 8800gt's for movie watching?