Build a dedicated Audio PC

[tony]

Wow Fran. You are nearly there. Looks like we will have 5-6 versions to try out! Nige x2,your one,zuma and whatever John comes up with.

[jkeny]

Great work, as usual, Fran (we have come to expect nothing less from you).
Thanks for cleaning up the Ciúnas thread.

BTW, playing a song from the Win-to-go (WTG) stick seems to me to be not nearly as expansive as playing the same song from an SSD.
I put a song on the WTG stick & no internal SSD - booted from WTG & played it.
Shutdown & then put the SSD drive back in but booted from WTG & played same song from SSD. Result = sounds more expansive. When I then played this same song from WTG some loss of sound stage, I feel?

But when I boot from SSD & play the same song, there's a little bit of sibilance creeps in so booting from WTG seems the Way To Go (WTG) :).

All done with Ultrasize (US) = 200 (I need to check this again). I'll experiment further with reducing US

I see some people on Jplay forum reporting a bit of HF emphasis with latest Release. I wonder if it's because they are booting from SSD?

One other possible tweak occurs to me which may bear fruit - we can independently power the WTG stick & use clean PS rather than USB power (I'm a stickler for this :)). Easy enough to do by using a USB male to female adapter which has been wired to bring out the PS. Fran, you get what I mean, I'm sure?

[nige2000]

Wow Fran. You are nearly there. Looks like we will have 5-6 versions to try out! Nige x2,your one,zuma and whatever John comes up with.

i have 4 builds we could try out but ill have two silent builds builds end of next week an i3 and a i7 that will be a proper comparison

[nige2000]

Great work, as usual, Fran (we have come to expect nothing less from you).
Thanks for cleaning up the Ciúnas thread.

BTW, playing a song from the Win-to-go (WTG) stick seems to me to be not nearly as expansive as playing the same song from an SSD.
I put a song on the WTG stick & no internal SSD - booted from WTG & played it.
Shutdown & then put the SSD drive back in but booted from WTG & played same song from SSD. Result = sounds more expansive. When I then played this same song from WTG some loss of sound stage, I feel?

But when I boot from SSD & play the same song, there's a little bit of sibilance creeps in so booting from WTG seems the Way To Go (WTG) :).

All done with Ultrasize (US) = 200 (I need to check this again). I'll experiment further with reducing US

I see some people on Jplay forum reporting a bit of HF emphasis with latest Release. I wonder if it's because they are booting from SSD?

One other possible tweak occurs to me which may bear fruit - we can independently power the WTG stick & use clean PS rather than USB power (I'm a stickler for this :)). Easy enough to do by using a USB male to female adapter which has been wired to bring out the PS. Fran, you get what I mean, I'm sure?

i must try the booting from wtg and music storage on ssd i never tried it

are you using usb3 or usb2?

good idea on separating the power supply to the usb stick to another source it would be definitly be worth a experiment

[jkeny]

And the result from the JK jury - dix points
Yesss, independent PS to USB stick is definitely worth it.
Playing the song from the WTG brings all the sound stage back (& maybe a bit more clarity?). It also might be bringing a bit more clarity when playing song from SSD but I'd need to defer to other ears on this one.
Interestingly, looking at my bench supply, which is providing the 5V PS to the WTG, I see it jump to >100mA current draw when stick is accessed so no wonder this works - it keeps any PS ripple/sag off the main PC supply.

Yes, Nige, I'm still using USB3 stick and this is with my netbook, not my NUC yet - that's for tomorrow. I wanted to establish some datapoints about all this before I jumped into the NUC trials.

So now we have another can of worms to consider - what are the major current draws in the PC & how to stabilise them or remove their influence? SSD/HDD would seem to be another major one. I'll remove the SSD now & see if that has an effect

[nige2000]

Great progress john fantastic work

[Fran]

nige2000 others:

There are a few cheapish i7 3770 on sale on german ebay, all from various sellers with 100% feedback, listed as "new, unused but b-grade, original packaging may not be available". Price is €250 + €9 delivery - the best out there right now. No heatsink included (ok as I have one already).

Anyone ever heard anything about any of these?

Fran

[jkeny]

Removed SSD but need other ears here to determine if there is an effect - I believe that I'm hearing extra clarity but placebo effect, maybe?

Another area that draws current & warrants attention is WiFi card if used ( I had mine on while doing these tests).
I also am not fanless on this netbook so again there are more gains to be had here!

It seems to me that the better sound quality that everybody is getting with all these mods fanless, SSD, SATA cables, etc. are really got to do with stabilising the main PS as much as possible.

As I have been saying for a while now - we are dealing with a very complex device (PC) & trying to simplify it - really the ultimate realisation of this is a much simpler base system i.e ARM CPU & simple surrounding devices.

[nige2000]

id chance it myself as long as the feedback was good, cpus tend to be more safe to buy than memory and motherboards

[jkeny]

All this reminds me of a post I made earlier in this thread which linked to a guy doing crazy mods to his PC to bring the TPD down to about 6W - how can I do a search on a thread to find it as he had some interesting analysis of the various current draws of the components within a PC?