GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

Audio Discussions
Topic: What is quiet enough?

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Posted by Romy the Cat on 09-28-2014

It looks like my computer playback box is kind of dying, not to mention that it is hugely outdated now. It is 10 year old box that still run on Win XP pro and 4G memory. It begins to throw fists here and there; it is time to replace it, I think that shall incudes the box. The contemporary mashies are so much quieter that I will be with no problem able to put them in the listening room and do not hide the box o the basement as I do now. Also, old idea was to put a lot of driver in the box, nowadays it is not necessary as the drivers might live in separate NAS storage.

Of cause I will not be buying any off the shelf solutions. They are ridicules in term of price and I am not sure that they deliver any interesting performance. I will get some kind of genetic box and will reuse my Lynx 16 card (that I still like a lot) and my drives.

I am think about two options. Fist is ThinkServer ts140. It is server class machine with 25dB noise. Second is to take any good pro workstation (like HP Z400). Probably it will be Win 7 and WaveLab 6 but am for sure this time would like to have the DAW in my listening room. I literally would like to have the whole new DAW project to be no more then $300-$400.

Posted by rowuk on 09-29-2014

There of course is a ton of garbage on the net about the sound quality of a DAW with WLAN vs gigabit ethernet, analog or digital power supplies, memory, manufacturer of hard drive, active ports.
I have primarily only really invested in lowest noise and a very good DAC. Quality SSD drives for the unit in my listening room, manual power supply fan control gives me a unit that is simply not acoustically audible from my listening position. The media server is a linux based NAS box in another room. I am very Apple/iTunes centric as I simply hate dealing with Windows. I have no claims about better or worse sound quality (although the firewire port does let me use some DACs that sound better to me than the USB versions that I have tried). I find nothing that I can define as "wrong" and a whole lot that I can define as very "convenient" - including headless operation with an iPod as a remote control.
I think with high quality SSDs and a very, very quiet power supply (passively cooled?), $400 will not be that easy to hit. At least in Germany it wouldn't be.

Posted by Romy the Cat on 09-29-2014

For sure despite my attitude against computer audio I will rebuild my dyeing machine. However, in addition to regular critiques that I have toward to computer audio lately a few more points were added. The social and economical situation in Boston is such that both classical stations are losing customer, revenue, people get laid off and whoever are still on the job have very little idea what they are doing. The times when broadcasts were followed by me applauding air-check to the folks who did broadcasts, they analyzed sound and make correction… those times are gone. Nowadays sound from broadcast is horrible. Last week there was André Nelson opening the season with all Wagner program and I was not able to listen more than 15 minutes - that was so bad. The point is that without getting new music via recording life broadcast what would be way to acquire new music to DAW. I have a lot of downloads from numerous so called Hi-Res sources but none of those recordings attract me to listen them again. So, if we scope our collection of our recording to the crap that industry might upload to out DAWs then MP3s of a phone would do just fane.

Posted by Serge on 10-08-2014

Romy the Cat wrote:
Win 7 and WaveLab 6

Well some years ago I need to edit some cassette to digital transfers and I tried a few DAW softwares for Windows (which were available as free trials). Adobe Audition was by far the least damaging to sound. I think that 'old' CS3.0 version is available free of charge now. That'd be my choice.
For hardware I don't have any recommendations. As well as for what you'd be recording with this too.

Posted by xandcg on 12-30-2015

If the idea is just to listen and not make any sort of manipulation, you may want to give a try to RuneAudio or Volumia or AP Linux, they are free anyway:

http://www.runeaudio.com/
https://volumio.org/
http://www.ap-linux.com/

Seasonic have fanless PSU, but it think they are too big for that purpose:

http://seasonic.com/product-category/consumer-products/platinum-fanless/

CAT (Core Audio Technologies) make ATX Linear PSU but very expensive:

http://www.coreaudiotechnology.com/products/music-servers/atx-linear-power-supply/

Streacom make fanless chassis, several models:

http://www.streacom.com/

Also there are OrigenÆ chassis:

http://www.origenae.com/

Lian Li have some chassis (mATX and MiniITX) I like but they are a bit expensive:

http://www.lian-li.com/en/products/#152/1/list
http://www.lian-li.com/en/products/#37/1/list

Page 1 of 1 (5 items)