I've become a "computer audiophile"!

Yup great review, and to see JA exclaim "wow" after hearing them I think I have only seen him say that about the DCS Vivaldi if memory serves me right. The biggest telling thing for me is reading how many people that were former vinyl and/or tube amp people that switched and never looked back. Mostly to Kii Three more than the D&D but I imagine a lot of that is Kii's significantly larger dealer network and size of the company.

 

Bought the fancy Qobuz subscription. Must have highest resolution streaming and the discount pricing on downloads.

I can see how a serious music lover might want more than 24 hours in a day (or a second lifetime). The discoveries and possibilities are unlimited.

 

So check this out....I rescued a X58 PC from 2008 that was rotting away in my basement for years (wife forgot to throw it in the trash). I searched long and hard for a small form factor case that would fit in my stereo rack for HTPC usage and some gaming. Looked at all the Silverstone and so many other ITX cases out there.... I eventually settled on a Coolermaster Q500, which cost me a measly 50ish bucks (that's any good lad's bar bill on a thursday evening).

Here's everything that this tiny li'l case managed to accommodate....
- A 6 core Xeon W3680 (base clock 3.4ish GHz, 30 bucks on ebay) which got overclocked out the wazoo to 4.7ish GHz (running stable), cooled by a 240mm liquid AIO
- The MB is full ATX size btw with a spdif out (should be fine latching on to one of my DACs)
- Full size power supply (950W corsair)
- GPU is a liquid cooled Radeon R9 295x2 (AMD's flagship from 2015). Size of this card is 307mm by 114mm by 42mm. It is perhaps one of the largest cards out there, but had no problems fitting in this tiny li'l case.

Proud of this 13 year old project pc that can actually keep up with some modern rigs, i.e. if i wanna play some AAA titles at 1080p!

There is no other li'l case out there besides the Coolermaster Q500 that can fit all these things....
imgur.com

 

Xeon...what a name that a lot of ppl really crazy about in those days. I still remember when I built my dual CPU Pentium Pro 200, 128MB RAM with hardware SCSI adapter and 4 X Quantum Atlas II 10K 9GB drives, I felt like I was standing on top of the world...LMAO.

 

NUC8i7BEH
2x 8GB RAM
M.2 SSD 250GB
SATA SSD 4TB
RoonOS on USB stick
Codec file from internet

I was proud of my DIY server project. Most of us never install hardware or deal with software installation. I've reached my limits for such things!

That said, I won't be able to help myself at some point. My NUC is such a black box to me. There must be ways to further maximize performance. Audible improvement? I'll find out eventually. Figure power supply would be high on the list.

 

I was able to learn how to assemble an Intel NUC running a special Linux OS called ROCK. Easy DIY for computer folks, but pretty much at the limit of my ability to acquire and install my own hardware and software. I think your best bet is Aurender. I may end up going in that direction myself.

(BUMP)

I'm loving my stereo all over again. Roon with Qobuz integrated is really something. I don't yet have my entire redbook CD collection on my SSD (inside the NUC), but I'm getting there. I've hit a snag with my SACDs. Meantime, I can now stream, which has been pretty sweet. I can also buy downloads at good prices at Qobuz.

My network player's DAC, digital side and analog, seems to be quite good. Would love to get a showdown versus the likes of dCS Bartok and Naim.

Anyone else care to chime in here. Ask questions. Answer questions!

Share your experiences so we can all optimize our computer front end.

Appreciated.

 

950W PSU on a humble audio and video streamer is madness.

 

it's probably just what @HIRES_FAN had on hand

 

Nice! I'm using a NUC (in a fanless case) with ROCK also. After years of being unimpressed by Roon, I found the 1.8 version quite good for most things -- still mediocre for classical music, but wonderful for bluegrass, pop, and jazz. It is a pleasure to have information about most recordings readily at hand. I formerly used Wikipedia and AllMusic for that, but Roon is far less tedious. I do like to know all the members of a jazz trio, e.g., not just the one whose name is on the cover, and Roon usually provides that.

Yes, Roon with Qobuz is a super combination.

I also keep a DLNA server running and from time to time switch to that mode of streaming. With my tagging scheme, it's much easier to find all Brahms piano concertos, say, in my local library through DLNA than through Roon. That's because of years of careful tagging by someone (me!) who understands and loves classical music and tagged it so things could be found.

 

It's comforting and refreshing to see another "playlister" who prefers to shuffle play. I started my collection as a 13 year old making mixed tapes in the 80's and I really enjoyed making genre themes and stuffing tracks randomly on a 90 min cassette. Of course, I was very willing to fork out stupid money to get one of the very first CD burners so I could make mixed CDs and then shuffle them! I thought that was the holy grail. Then moving into the computer, digital file (mp3.flac.wav) realm and being able to playlist, was another gamechanger. Then sending it around the house to different rooms? Then being able to send it from my house to my workplace and listen to it in my office? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? So awesome!

I spent years using J-River Media Center, tagging files and making smartlists and playlists. When I started to dabble into streaming, I found there was playlist converters out there, like Soundiiz, that could convert all of those playlists I made into Spotify (now Tidal) playlists.

I spent years rating 16,000 songs in my digital collection from 1 to 5 stars with J-River. At this moment, I'm streaming and shuffle playing a 7,000 song "4 and 5 stars" smartlist that resides in my home PC across town to my office. It honestly feels like my very own commercial-free radio station, where I know I'm going to really like or really love every song but I have no idea what's coming up next. It makes me giddy! Technology option-wise, there's never been a better time to be a music fan. Soooo lucky.

 

you can tell roon to use your tags in your files instead of its own- you can even do that for parts of your library/individual albums if you want to change it after importing them, too.

 

The NAS needs to hold tracks I never even want to hear, in addition to low-priority tracks and holiday collections. I'm in an early process of re-thinking how I use metadata, files, rating stars that I hope will make me smarter, along with my shuffling!

In addition to my tracks, I also need to keep whole Oldies and Classic Rock radio station libraries in there, prioritized by the correct mixes, edits and masters...in best quality, from hundreds of Various-Artist CDs and other resources. I only wish I'd had this level of databasing and storage/backup resources at my disposal back when I was still a Music Director!

 

Yes . . . However, Roon has no use for my "Instrument" and "Subgenre" tags. They are what I use to find things like guitar concertos, string quartets, and piano sonatas.

 

yeah, you're out of luck with truly arbitrary tags like instrument- but did you try seeing if roon will use your subgenre tags if you enable 'use genres extracted from file tags'?

 

You cannot shuffle tracks that have been mixed, if by mixing you mean dissolving one track into another DJ-style. Such a playlist can be listened to only in one particular track order.

I do make and listen to playlist, and they must be ordered. I expect a particular sequencing, I know what song comes next. Sometimes I mix the tracks together to produce a DJ-like mix, like this one:



But to clarify, to me a playlist is a specific sequence of tracks no longer... say, 100 tracks. Usually, fewer than that, maybe a couple of dozen.

When you have 200+ tracks (better to have around 500 of them), random listening starts making more sense, as you cannot have a meaningful narrative for hundreds of tracks. This randomized playlist is commonly known as "station" on streaming services. In fact, as far as I am informed, commercial stations do the same thing. They have a bunch of tracks, assign them to buckets, like "Hot", "Gold", "Heavy", "New", etc. Buckets have different priorities, like tracks from the hot rotation bucket are played more frequently. Bucket order is sometimes randomized, but certain buckets have specific time, like news or ads. Within the bucket, tracks are selected randomly.

Anyway, hundreds of shuffled tracks is not just a playlist, it is a randomized playlist or a "station" I do have those too, but never thought of them as of playlists.

 

I completely support you doing what works for you. But it is possible for shuffle play to be more meaningful than simply background music.

I walk daily. It is an essential part of my day. I consider it mental rejuvenation as well as well as physical exercise. I play my digital listening library (sans Christmas music) on shuffle as I walk. The unexpected juxtapositions are profound. Often I’m rocked back on my heels as two (or more) apparently unrelated pieces of music create a narrative that I wouldn’t necessarily thought to have programmed myself. It’s anything but background music.

Different strokes my friend. I respect your opinion immensely. However in this case your dismissal of shuffling as being inherently lightweight couldn’t be more wrong. Everybody’s brain is wired differently.

 

I'm a Squeezebox user and put a lot of info in the free-form comments field of my FLACs. If you or anyone else were to put something like "subgenreGuitarConcerto" in a FLAC comment, would one be able to search for "subgenreGuitarConcerto" in the comments? Would require you to be consistent with your commenting but could get you what you need if so.

 

I have "cheese on toast" as a genre tag on one album in my local library.
It's a large compilation set titled "Sounds of the 70s"
It's been that way since I ripped it, and lain unplayed until now, and it's pretty good.

The CD set is this one Sounds Of The 70s (1993, CD)

 

Do you mean in Roon? I don't think it searches in comments . . . it has its own metadata and no provision for including custom tags like mine. Unless I've missed something.

 

Depends on what I am listening to. If I am listening to CD's or records, I like to listen to the whole album from begining to end, in its original order. Sometimes, I will listen to just one side of a record, that is OK too.

But, when I use streaming, I prefer to select a "station" and then listen to random music within that specific station. I do liken it to selecting a specific station on the radio.

I never shuffle songs on a CD. I also have never created a playlist, nor had the desire to do so. Even with albums I have digitized, I never shuffle songs.

But, most of the time, when I am not intent on listening to something in particular, I prefer to stream, with random selections from a given station.

 

In radio, we are focused on the listener who is using, well, the music that appears on the radio. Singles. Tracks. An endless stream of everchanging selections, not connected by the sleeve or the case of an "album", but the broken stream of consciousness of music, as one artist is presented only by a representative song, one after the other. Very seldom is radio effective to present an entire album as its' whole self. That's not how radio works best, and it's not how its' users are used to listening to it.

We have learned that the listener itself, is more important than the music we play, and this listener has a day-to-day routine that we can only break-up for minutes at a time. Drive time averages around 22 minutes per person in its' purest form, and the people listening at any given moment changes every second. You cannot "perform" radio, as if one person is listening, but you must always make that person feel, as if he or she is the only one you care about. Imagine a show without a corporeal audience, because they are seldom aware of just how many they are at one time. Still, there is that sense of community, that awareness that you are taking hundreds of thousands of people with you in your car, even though you are alone.

This is why the listener isn't allowed to focus on only one artist for a long period of time, without being aware that if you were to do so...you would lose so many more people because of it, you would risk losing your community.

The home audiophile has no respect or empathy for this: his only needs are that personal preference, of choosing his own music, to his own liking. One could say without resentment, that the home audiophile actually "resents" the others listening to the same thing he may enjoy on the radio, because he knows, it is at the loss of his own control, that he is allowed this random stream of different music, without any personal say in it...either to choose to listen...or, switch the station.

But still we in radio recognize the overall effect, of constantly being "surprised" by fresh music, new songs, and old favorites, in some sort of a "soup" of expectations. And, we never, truly "shuffle" songs: we rotate them. So the result is not to give the audience the specific song they desire...it's to be the place where, the listener can encounter not only their favorite song, but more favorites, once the initial satisfaction is complete.

Radio invented "oh wow". And the more control you can assert over your listening at home, the more you lose that.

 

Ok, sounds like my idea to help you wouldn't work then. I've never used Roon, just trying to think of work-arounds based on your earlier comment.

 

Opening lyrics of "That Song" by Big Wreck

So I always get nostalgic with that song
But in my room it's forced
It has to be in some car across the street

When it comes to my own listening and discovery, or re-discovery, habits, I find that although there are moments when I can intentionally play the perfect music to match my mood, most of the Pavlov's Dogs-ish association with a song happens unintentionally or unpredictably. With the discovery algorithms used by streaming services when they're making recommendations for me, songs that I have forgotten or have missed as I've accumulated my collection over the past 40 years will come up and I will experience this conflicted feeling of the joy of saying "Wow, I remember this song!" combined with the anger of "Crap! I've been missing this for 30 years and it should have been in regular rotation! Grrrr!!!".

I know this stems from the financial realities of my youth, when there was only so much disposable income to purchase music and my wishlist was always substantially longer than what I could acquire, so music that I coveted simply gathered dust in a remote corner of the universe, only to be rediscovered when Spotify or Tidal snuck it into some random daily or genre mix.

My point is that random, spontaneous and unexpected connections to some particular music is just as satisfying as sitting down and putting on that album that you know you've wanted to listen to all day.

 

Put on an album you've never heard before at home, and you'll have an equal opportunity to be excited and surprised by music you don't know. The "oh wow" of music isn't lost at all in that context. I listen to new albums and new to me music every week. Totally fresh.

Put on a classic rock station on the radio and listen for an hour and there's high likelihood, if you're a rock listener of a certain age, that you'll only hear entirely familiar music. Hell, put on a CHR station and listen for a couple of days. Even if you didn't know any of the music at the start, you'll be deeply familiar with it in 48 hours. It seems to me that most of the radio programming I encounter is more about repetition and familiarity than revelation or surprise. That's not an "oh wow" experience. It's not like, "oh wow" More like, "here comes 'Bohemian Rhapsody' or 'Levitating' again."

I don't think it's a question of respect or empathy, and it's certainly not a question of resentment -- honestly, does anyone over the age of 18 actually resent someone else for the music they like or music listening experience they like? Doesn't that kind of thing go away with the end of puberty? -- it's just a question of what one person enjoys vs. what a different person enjoys.

I mean, I really like radio, I like the intimacy of it, and I like the live connectedness of it -- something that's largely gone actually from most commercial music radio in the US at this point with pre-recorded shows, generic hosts, highly controlled playlists.

I like radio shows where I learn something and radio shows were I encounter music I haven't heard before, especially if there's an interesting host. There are radio shows I enjoy like Phil Schaap's Bird Flight or Robert Aubrey Davis' Baroque & Beyond, or Sirius XM's Living American, the Sirius XM live Philadelphia Orchestra broadcasts. And sometimes I like radio because it plays things that are familiar too -- like if I'm out on a 15 minute errand, I can just pop on the Elvis channel on Sirius and hear a couple of bopping favorite tunes I'll enjoying singing along with and I don't need to commit to anything. It's just a distraction.

But even as a radio listener, I tend to turn to specific shows or specific content. I put on radio for sports. I put on radio for news. I put on radio for current affairs talk. Not so much for music. I'm also mostly interested in jazz and classic music, and the radio options are pretty limited, even with a satellite radio subscription and being in the biggest media market in the country. But when I'm out of my car, I almost never have the desire to replicate the experience of music on the radio in any other context.

I have no resentment for other people who dig it. Hell, it was how I fell in love with music in the first place, listening to music on the radio as a kid. It just that sort of one thing after another programming no longer rings my chimes.

 

I like college radio and I think probably all of them stream live now. They play things that are so off the radar for me that I don't think I would find them any other way. And they often have some insights into the music they can relay to the listener.