Music Server options

thejck

I was looking at a rasbery pi to replace the pc and reduce the excess noise that a PC makes and came across something that I have no experience before. an I2s bus instead of using USB. Has anyone played with this on here if it actully makes a big difference vs a quality USB dac?

tonyb

thejck wrote: »

I was looking at a rasbery pi to replace the pc and reduce the excess noise that a PC makes and came across something that I have no experience before. an I2s bus instead of using USB. Has anyone played with this on here if it actully makes a big difference vs a quality USB dac?

I think your barking up the wrong tree on that one. A separate dac will be light years ahead of that thing....which isn't built for audio anyway.

How about we start from the beginning. Obviously there is something you don't like about your sound. Elaborate some on that please.

Your streaming from the computer ? Or hard wired with a usb connection ? Are you using ITunes to store your music or some other program ? What are you using to burn the music to your computer ?

You asked questions in another thread of which I responded as to your gear. Both of these will run hand in hand so maybe like I said, lets start at the beginning and tell us what your hearing and don't like.

thejck

I store my music in flac format on a Samba server in the basement. My dedicated ht and audio windows 7 pc maps a drive to it. I use foobar with Wasapi setup to my chaintech av-710 soundcard and use the toslink spdif out to my dac.
I spent a long time listening to music the other day and when i turned it off i had this feeling of relief. So i went searching for answers and one of them i came across was jitter.
Apparently its not great on a spdif connection and even worse when using a toslink optiocal out.

asych USb is the way to go from what I gather. which is why I have a quest for a new dac.

While researching for a christmas gift for myself (someone wanted to know what to get me i came across an article about the rasbery pi with a hiberry dac and i started reading about I2s. i have no experience with this type of bus before and so i was wondering if this offset's some of the jitter issue that you are faced with in a pc as a source setup.

Its been a while since i tweaked anything and there is a lot more information out there.
I am worndering if there is some better way to setup a pc for audio out other than the bit perfect setup with foobar and the wasapi driver.

tonyb

Basically you use your computer as a storage device, of which most have noise. USB into an Asych dac should eliminate any audible jitter. That's the cheapest way, effective too, to get around jitter created in computer drives.

For those too young to remember, back in the day the cdp was 2 pieces. They used to separate the transport and dac....in higher end circles anyway. Today most gear has reduced jitter to inaudible levels so no need to keep them apart anymore. Think of your computer the same way, you have to separate the storage part from the processing part. Not complicated really, just many ways to skin that cat. No offense to you cat lovers out there.