Build a dedicated Audio PC

[nige2000]

Alternatively, you could take a male to female USB extender cable & open it up & splice into the ground wire; cut the red Vbus wire & supply your own 5V supply?

thats more like what i was thinking, on the separate supply do i sever the ground to the pc and join to the external source or just join the external onto it

[jkeny]

Alternatively, you could take a male to female USB extender cable & open it up & splice into the ground wire; cut the red Vbus wire & supply your own 5V supply?

thats more like what i was thinking, on the separate supply do i sever the ground to the pc and join to the external source or just join the external onto it

No, leave the ground wire (usually black) in the USB cable intact, just splice your external ground into it.
Cut the 5V wire (usually red) & connect your external +5V to the wire that will feed the USB stick.

[nige2000]

Points 1 & 2:

some things are supplied power directly via the motherboard, most likely through DC-DC switching/regs from the 12V line - even the guy with the 7.5W pc mentions this, in his graphs at the end he shows CPU, platform controller hub (which I think is the controller for the other chips on the motherboard) and the RAM as the major power users. It is conceivable that when there is a large current draw by the CPU, say, then the other components are affected. If you take your USB experiment, this sort of thing could be why you are hearing differences. USB 3 supposedly has better power management, and can handle higher total draw (900mA vs 500mA) so that also may be a reason why you are hearing differences

Outside the motherboard, but coming from the picoPSU, you have the SATA drives. Note that many users suggest that SSD sounds better. Is this because they draw much less current than a spinning drive? These might have a different effect on sound quality as they are not routed through the motherboard itself?

On my test bench, the fan draws ~120mA. Thats more than some SSDs at idle - its not surprising that the fan affects sound, just as the SSD does.


Don't know if I'm making any sense to anyone other than me!! but it comes down to this:

Huge part of SQ = power supply

Other huge part as evidenced by jplay = memory management.

The jplay boys have done their bit, now the rest is up to us.


Fran

how many power supplies are we going to end up with
12v to picu
12 to cpu
5 to usb for WTG
5 to usb for dac
external usb drives for storage?

or will sharing one 12v and one 5 volt suffice

[Sligolad]

I am definitely convinced you are on the right track Fran, I know from building a couple of PCs that the more you have on USB and the more drives you have connected the Northbridge controller gets very hot and on one build I had to add a cooler on the northbridge. Where there is heat there is power!

Loading 5.1 last night I could get down to 20 milliseconds on Ultrastream and the only thing I changed since my last unsuccessful attempt was adding the iFiUSb power supply to the usb out from the Zuma, maybe this has taken away the load off the only usb port in use on the Zuma or the new 5.1 is better....not sure yet.

I am thinking of getting another iFiUSB for the music drive connected by usb to the control pc to take load off the motherboard on this pc as well.
Going to look for split usb cables like John posted and I know there are several makes out there now so all this should help.

Must get the Teddy Pardo back off Seb to see if it will power the sony control pc and whether it will make a difference.

Going to go after trying to reduce the stray emi and rfi from the power supplies on the Meitner, the laptop and the Zuma one of these days.

We should have some interesting comparisons to run in the coming weeks.

[nige2000]

No, leave the ground wire (usually black) in the USB cable intact, just splice your external ground into it.
Cut the 5V wire (usually red) & connect your external +5V to the wire that will feed the USB stick.

sound thats what i thought, just making sure (wouldnt work without the ground to mb)

[jkeny]

Must get the Teddy Pardo back off Seb to see if it will power the sony control pc and whether it will make a difference.

Going to go after trying to reduce the stray emi and rfi from the power supplies on the Meitner, the laptop and the Zuma one of these days.

We should have some interesting comparisons to run in the coming weeks.

I sent Seb a PM a couple of weeks ago about this Teddy Pardo PS but haven't heard back from him.

[nige2000]

some pics of my i7 and i3 build

http://www.flickr.com/photos/94535564@N03/

[Fran]

Is that one of those passive heatsink in the bigger build? Does it work ok? They're pricy enough about 100 or so... Is it worth it?

[nige2000]

Is that one of those passive heatsink in the bigger build? Does it work ok? They're pricy enough about 100 or so... Is it worth it?

its completely silent
if i have a disk drive in it i can hear it spinning
no hard drive i can hear a hum from the monitor

yea about 100 euro expensive enough but it stays under 50 degrees under normal conditions
also have one of these in there
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pow ... 189-5.html

so it gets expensive
i think its worth it, as i hope they will last a few years and a couple of builds

i listen to music when im on the computer the noise of the pc used to annoy me

[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?

tried two ssd s in the i3 one for storage one for os. have to more testing but i think it sounds more clear than WTG and SSD storage but not by much