I mentioned in another thread some of the experiments I've been conducting on my home music system. One of these is to replicate my entire CD collection to high-quality files on a NAS, so I'm prepared for the day my expensive but elderly Naim CD player is no longer serviceable.
I can play these files through my Sonos Connect and the very nice new Meridian converter; first impression is that this combination compares well with the original CDs played on the Naim. But I'm also curious about the value of higher sample rate 'High Def' audio files, and the Sonos can't play those.
Plenty of ready-made streamers can, of course, but I'm wondering about using a computer instead. I can explore the sound quality with a laptop, but that's not long-term practical for the living room. But a small, silent, fanless computer might be, especially if it could be set up and then run 'headless' with an iPad as a control console. It wouldn't need fancy audio interfaces because the Meridian can accept 24/192 through its USB input.
The Mac Mini seems to be one option - but it's Apple-priced, of course. So I wondered about a little PC like an Intel NUC, about the size of a box set of CDs, which I could build with a solid-state disk and no fan, so no noise at all. It wouldn't even look out of place on the bottom tier of my rack, with a wired connection to the NAS in the hall for media files.
So my questions are mostly IT rather than audio. Are these things good value? Could I control one from in iPad? Would I need Windows or would Ubuntu work equally well? Or should I cough up for an Apple - or a Naim streamer?
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I built a video media server on a headless Raspberry pi for about £25 and an afternoon playing; very tiny, silent, well supported, I can control it from the iPad, streams to my AppleTV/Playstation if wanted etc. Rock solid - never needs a reboot and I found it good fun learning about it all.
No idea about making it do pure audio stuff but I imagine it's equally achievable if you enjoy such things.
An improved pi is available now at the same price I paid.
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Thanks Cranks. Now you mention it I've seen reports of people using the Pi for audio purposes. Would be a bit of fun to try too for very little risk.
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Indeed. I took the view that if it didn't work I could always repurpose it. There's a gad zillion things you could do with it. I had fun sending text strings to the Google voice servers (or apple's Siri, I can't recall offhand) and getting it to speak them back to me for example. Great for audio alerts about whatever you fancy. All with some online tutorials.
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+1 for the Pi. I set one up last year to hold my music collection on 2 attached USB sticks. Works faultlessly with my Logitech Duet player. Great for internet radio too, Radio Paradise mainly. Network cable to router for reliability.
Steve.
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Yeah I have something like that, it sits under my telly for when we want to read the internet together (choosing holidays etc) and also runs music from my NAS or a plugged-in USB drive for my New Years Eve party.
You have to give it a few minutes after boot up to primp itself a bit before expecting too much of it but otherwise it seems OK for what I use it for. The really good thing is how cool it runs, in an under-telly cupboard without much venting (doesn't use many watts either).
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Yes, could work. I see the £250 i3 version has an HDMI that would let it reach our TV (given where it will sit) and work for holiday planning and the like (need to do a bit of that pronto) and an S/PDIF digital out as well as the USB. Think I'll start with a Pi, though, to try out the idea. I don't actually have any digital files (yet) above the resolution the Sonos can cope with.
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New Pi version 3 launched today, WDB, if you missed it.
Costs £30, gains wifi and bluetooth onboard, if you wanted those. Older ones still available and cheaper of course. There's even a £5 one that I think is the same as the one I have, actually.
Last edited by: Crankcase on Mon 29 Feb 16 at 13:36
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Thanks, Cranks. I had missed it - and was late seeing your nudge too. I don't need wifi or Bluetooth for this job - in fact I suspect they'd be a source of electrical noise - but I can always turn them off.
There do seem to be some 'issues' relating to the Pi's Ethernet and USB interfaces sharing a single I/O bus, and this causing noise when using Ethernet to fetch files and USB to feed digital output to the DAC, as I intend to do. I suppose one option might be to do without wired Ethernet and trust my vastly improved wifi (see Router thread) to deliver 24/192 files (once I have some) at 9mb/s.
But if it proves too much for a Pi to handle in the main system, I can pay another £30 for a Pi-sized DAC board, wire the output to a pair of active PC speakers and create a desktop streaming player for another room.
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I did a lot of reading about the Raspberry Pi and very nearly bought one before another idea occurred to me.
Part of my job is to give travelling briefings and demos on some of our products. These days it's easiest to do this from a virtual machine on a laptop, but we also bought a handful of diskless 'thin client' PCs that seemed like a good idea at the time. These have been lurking forgotten in a cupboard for the last three years, so this evening I brought one home for a little experiment.
The other part of the experiment is something called Daphile, which is loaded on to a USB stick to create a bootable, audio-specific Linux OS. Half an hour to set it up, about the same again to get it to find and read the music share on my NAS, and it's playing Beethoven through the USB input of the Meridian DAC, and controlled (rather slowly) from a browser window on my iPad Mini. The Windows Embedded 2009 image on the PC remains unused and untouched.
It works, although I'm unconvinced by the sound quality so far. First time I've used the Meridian in USB mode, and to me it sounds brittle and a bit rushed, without the easy fluidity I get from the Sonos through the coax input. This may be because it's now taking power and data from the same USB port on the little computer. I'll keep the thing over the weekend and experiment some more with the connections, the power source and the control interface. I may even download a hi-res version of something I already have on CD for a comparative listen.
But if it works out it could be a good bet. A thin client PC can be got used for next to nothing, is built for serious commercial use (I've seen one on the counter in a builders' merchant, for example) so ought to be more reliable than a Pi. With luck I can tweak this one to sound a bit better too.
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Time for a proper fiddle this morning and I'm much more impressed. For a start, I've discovered that I don't need the clunky browser control if I install the free Logitech Squeezebox app with which this player is designed to work. It's not quite Sonos-slick but I could hand it to a guest without having to offer detailed technical explanations of how to use it and where to find the music.
As for the music itself, that's working much better too. I suspect I didn't quite have the right head on the other night and rushed things, but I'm much happier with it now. I think it'll probably get better still once I can fix up a proper offboard power supply to the DAC - which I'll need to do to connect the Sonos box at the same time.
Next step - and the real purpose of this experiment - is to get hi-def versions of recordings I already know and see how big a difference I can hear. Good fun so far.
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Another in this occasional series. The night before last I bought and downloaded a 24-96 version of The Who's Who's Next - not part of my collection before but something I've enjoyed through Deezer at 16-44.1 quality. Played it through the little PC and it worked - I know because a different LED came on on the front of the DAC.
I'm wary of leaping to conclusions. I downloaded the 16-44.1 file as well and the hi-res version isn't a night-and-day improvement on what's already a pretty good presentation. But it does sound wider, with the instruments better spaced. There's more drumminess and crash to the drums and cymbals too, and more of the characteristic roughness of Daltrey's voice comes across. Certainly enjoyable, but I want to spend some more time with it before I buy my entire music collection all over again.
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Mini-PC as media server - Crankcase
