Recently, having upgraded my amplification, I decided that I had really had enough of listening to lossy audio on my Otto jukebox. Following some research, I’ve built a new device which plays FLAC-format lossless audio. Fed via balanced AES/EBU to my Meridian 518 for dithering to 24 bit, decoded by my ageing AX-1 and then into the Bryston, the sound is to my ears, far superior to that of CDs played on my FMJ DV27 through the same signal path. The next step will be to replace the Yamaha as decoder. More on that later…
Currently, the box is comprised of the following:
- Digigram VX222v2 audio card
- Travla C137 Case (90-Watt version, to fit in the audio card (Digigram have however just announced a short-form version of the VX222v2, which would probably fit in the 120-Watt version of the case)), with internal fan disabled. There were two reasons for this choice of case: it seems to be the only compact mini-ATX case which can take two PCI cards, and it has a form factor almost identical to the Meridian 5-series
- Old Epia 5000 C3 motherboard that was lying around, with BIOS updated
- Fujitsu MHT2040T as boot disk (very quiet)
- Netgear MA311 802.11b card
- Samsung SP1614N in an external no-brand enclosure with USB/Firewire interfaces to actually store the music. Again, very quiet
Playback is via Mplayer through ALSA, with Otto as the jukebox interface. The whole thing runs on Fedora Core 2.
The only real issue with the install was that out of the box, FC2 won’t actually install on C3 processors without a recompiled kernel. Sigh. And I can’t get the Xorg X implementation to work with the hacked Trident driver that on XFree let me get widescreen S-video onto my plasma screen — for now I’m using my iPaq as remote, over wireless, which is actually more convenient than having to turn the screen on anyway. There is no particular reason for the choice of (obviously bug-ridden) Fedora. In fact I’m sure that some playing with, say, LFS, could get the core components down to something that would happily boot from flash. But at the moment the box is a testbed rather than a product, so I’m happy to heave it the way it is for now. And in any case, it’s the music I’m interested in, not the tech.
And I am genuinely amazed at how good it sounds — music simply has more space to breathe. Acoustic string bass in particular is more languid and rich, and every element of complex arrangements has more depth and detail, compared to CDs played on the Arcam. I’ve been literally rediscovering things I thought I knew inside out. And that makes it all worthwhile.
I’ve also discovered than Digigram genuinely care about open source use of their hardware — within a day of posting a question regarding another of their soundcards on an ALSA mailing list, one of their people contacted me directly to find out what I was planning and what features would be most important to me in a possible future ALSA driver release for the card in question. So they don’t just make excellent hardware, they’ve actually read Cluetrain. Impressed.
[Update: later moved to alsaplayer with jack as the sound server]
