On Sat,19.Jul.08, 15:37:00, Nick Lidakis wrote: > Ron Johnson wrote: >> - >> Mark it [OT] and post away! > > Thanks... > > Just thought someone could benefit from this application, or I could > receive some constructive criticism on some of choices I had made.
I would only like to give my setup as example. > I had been researching way to assemble an audiophile grade music server > since early last year for my dedicated listening room. There were > several ready to go retail (Sonos, Slim Devices, McIntosh, etc.) > solutions that were quickly dismissed because of price and/or their > closed hardware/software nature. The server had to fit several criteria: > > 1. open source, preferably Debian based (apt makes software easy to > install and it's my desktop OS) > 2. relatively low cost > 3. audiophile grade (FLAC output via USB without any re-sampling and/or > conversion of the audio stream) > 4. power efficiency (preferably below 10 watts) > 5. absolute silence ( NO fans or disk drives in the listening room) > 6. ability to control music and play lists from the listening position > with relative ease. > 7. stability [...] I have an old box with standard hardware: PIII-500MHz (with a huge fanless sink) on a i440BX chipset and 256MB RAM [1]. When the HDD died I built a custom Live-Debian image for it, as it won't boot from USB or disks larger than 32GB (and the BIOS update won't apply). It also has a sound card with both coaxial and optical digital out (based on CMI-8738) connecting to my receiver and a fanless nVidia GForce card. As the PSU is also pretty quiet the noise level is ok as long as the CD doesn't spin [2]. It's main purpose was to be able to watch movies on my TV, but I use it mostly to listen to my favorite radio station [3] or listen to music in whatever format available (but preferably flac or ogg) by accessing a samba share from my laptop or even directly from an external USB drive. Right now I am experimenting with pulseaudio to provide a decent output for my laptop. I have to say it works very well, I was able to watch a movie on the laptop with the sound output over a wireless g connection without any problems. Too bad moc doesn't know pulseaudio :( [1] Actually it's a 512MB stick, but the board is limited to 256MB per slot [2] I'm planning on acquiring a PCI-to-USB2 adapter and then use the CD only for booting [3] The reception is no very good where I live, over the internet it's much better Regards, Andrei -- If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. (Albert Einstein)
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