Killer Specs for High End PC in 2006

In response to the PC part of your post I would recommend Building the Perfect PC by Robert Bruce Thompson. I believe that reading this will give you a firm basis for designing the PC system you want, and also for dealing with custom PC builders. There is a website associated with the book: www.hardwareguys.com.

First of all, the recommendations for a Mac OS X based system is a great start. It sounds like you want more than just a music media server. In general, Apple's OS X and their Mac computers are really better geared for handling digital media like audio and video than PCs.

There are some good guidelines for building a Windows XP PC and optimizing the OS for best audio performance. The first reference, I would go to is Tascam who manufactures professional audio products (http://www.tascam.com/Products/US-428/W2k_XP_Optimize.pdf). They have a great guide to optimizing Windows XP and Windows 2000 for professional audio applications. For the most part, the same recomendations would hold true for a music server as well. You can use Google or any other Web search portal to find out how to best build a quiet, or even silent, PC.

For a high end Windows XP system, I would recommend the following:

- 1 GB RAM minimum from reputable manufacturer
- Intel chipset-based motherboard with IEEE 1394 (FireWire) controller and port(s) and AGP support and room for at least one PCI slot for soundcard
- ATI Radeon or nVidea AGP graphics card with required video output
- Intel P4 (single or dual core processor) with Hyperthreading
- 80 GB hard drive for Windows XP and audio applications
- Additional quiet drives (i.e., Seagate Barracudas): 1 drive for audio (7200 rpm or faster, SATA), 1-2 drives for video (7200 rpm or faster, SATA). I recommend Glyph Technologies FireWire drive systems as they are encased in quiet enclosures and optimized for best performance for digital media.
- Plextor DVD/CD optical drive for playback and writing
- Prosumer-level PCI soundcard from M-Audio, Emu, ESI, Echo Audio, RME Audio or Lynx Technologies with S/PDIF and/or Toslink digital output
- Aluminum silent or quiet PC case
- Noiseless or quiet 350W (minimum) power supply and silent cooling like heatpipes or ultra-quiet fans. Zalman makes very nice products for this.

Since a high end PC is going to cost some bucks, I really recommend buying a pre-built unit rather than rolling your own. Let a qualified technician with professional test equipment and experience sweat hardware and driver compatibility issues. For custom builders, I would recommend companies that build pro audio digital audio workstations (DAWs) for starters:

http://www.adkproaudio.com/systems/Hometheatre.cfm
http://www.carillondirect.com/clnweb/index.jsp?country=US
http://www.centralcomputer.com/systems/Pro_Audio/system.asp
http://www.hushtechnologies.net/

Some of these builders have the flexibilty of building a PC with any HTPC case of your choice.

The Glyph Technologies FireWire drives work very well with both Macs and PCs. Most Glyph customers are musicians like Herbie Hancock who use Macs exclusively for music production. If you have a large budget for hard drives and even RAID systems, go with archiving your entire libraray in uncompressed files like AIFF or WAV (a.k.a. PCM files); otherwise, you can use the lossless file compression formats like FLAC, ALE, etc. Besides FireWire for connecting the computer to the outboard media drives, you could go with a Network Attached Storage (NAS) RAID or multi-drive appliance that can sit somewhere else in your home. I would use 100Base-T or 1000Base-T (Giga-Bit) Ethernet connections. Wireless is great, but it's not bullet-proof and not as secure as a wired LAN. How would you like a slacker to tap into your big dollar rig and destroy your archived music files? That's one reason why I am not thrilled with the Squeeze Box technology.

Again, by the time you invest in the hardware to make a Windows XP sing (and do it quietly), you could have easily saved a lot of trouble buying a Mac system that does the same thing straight out-of-the-box. iTunes on a Mac is far better than iTunes on a PC since iTunes on a PC relies on the Windows OS K-Mixer that can compromise streaming digital playback of your tunes. iTunes has a superior user interface and it works seamlessly with iPods which are great for portable audio.

For digital-to-analog conversion, get a good DAC with S/PDIF input that has a clock and circuitry for minimizing jitter. On the other hand, you could get a USB DAC like the Wavelength Audio's Brick USB DAC that also minimizes jitter through using USB bus technology. Be careful regarding USB audio interfaces, because some USB devices don't incorporate the same technology as Wavelength Audio to reduce jitter. As hard drive-based music servers gain popularity, I believe we'll see more USB DACs on the market.

If you plan on using nearfield, active monitors, you'll still need a preamp or passive volume control to control your volume via analog means and to serve as a source switching device if you plan to use more than a PC as a music source. Some active monitors only have balanced 1/4" TRS or XLR inputs which means you would need a preamp with balanced outputs to extract the best audio performance. One of the nicer active monitors I have heard were the Dynaudio BM6as, which I feel are every bit as good as anything I've heard from an audiophile stand-mounted monitor.

Rhing

In the words of Charlie Brown: THAT'S IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hope to hear more from others who have built windows systems for audio, but you really covered the topic here so thank you very much!

My pleasure. I should mention that with a Windows XP system, it is best to use a soundcard with ASIO drivers. Windows XP's kernel mixer or K-Mixer could adversely effect the quality of the output. For that reason, Foobar 2000 ends up being the best media player for music. Windows Media Player and iTunes for the PC cannot be altered to bypass the K-Mixer.

My guess is you were nearly flamed on another forum for suggesting alienware...one of the biggest ripoffs in the computing world (it's so bad, it almost reminds me of high end audio). The other reason is probably because you may not realize that the playing of audio is about the least intensive task you could find for a computer. As long as you heed Rhing's advice to bypass XP's kernel mixer, nearly any computer will do.

Point in case: I'm currently running a 2tb RAID-5 server off of a very old dual 450mhz Dell. I'm using ASIO drivers and an external soundcard and dac. Excluding the hard drives, the current value of that computer is less than $20. If spending $6k on a POS Alienware computer makes you feel good, by all means, go for it. But it won't sound a bit better.

I have several other computers of varying vintages. My ripping is all done on a 3.2ghz machine with a Plextor drive and then moved to the server. Any games played are likewise done so on a fast machine. All machines are wireless, the server is both. I VNC in from a laptop on my couch to the server in my basement to stream the music to my stereo.

I don't see the point in a cost no object PC unless you are just into wasting money. I have 6 computers in this house right now, the combined total is less than 1 Alienware computer and they each do their respective task at least as good as what an Alienware could do if not better. There's certainly no need for this number of computers, but I would suggest you get 2. Anyone that thinks they're going to put a server in a listening room and actually be able to hear the music is either planning on some very serious and expenive custom work, or is completely deaf. You're going to want a server in a basement or attic and you're probably not going to want to trek down there to play games or rip discs. That's where the second "fast" machine comes in.

As far as actually listening to nearfield music while sitting at the computer (not laptop). I've tried several pc soundsystems, went up to about the $600, and had it all sound like crap. I'm sure there are monitors out there that could sound very good, but the amount of money I would have to spend to make me not want to get up and walk 20 feet to where my main stereo is, is simply not worth it.