Looking into using my PC as my source

[vuittion]

I need some advice please.

I am looking into using my PC as my main source and want to know the most cost effective way to connect it up to my Graham Slee Green Solo headphone amp.

At the present time my setup is as follows.

Denon DCD700AE CD player
Green Solo Headphone Amp
Chord Crimson Interconnect cable

This setup sounds really good, but I have very limited space and ideally would love to connect the PC up to the Green Solo.

Many thanks.

[dc]

can either get a good soundcard and use its line outs to the amp

or get one with a SPDIF optical/coaxial out and use it with any DAC of your choice

[fanboi]

Or maybe forget the soundcard and SPDIF and use a USB DAC direct - install ASIO4ALL and use foobar with it.

[mrarroyo]

At $100 the Silverstone EB01 (USB DAC) is a fantastic performer. www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16812162002

[vuittion]

That Silverstone EB01 (USB DAC) looks interesting.

I wonder if I can get it anywhere in the UK.

Gonna have a quick look on google UK

Many thanks for the replies so far.

[vuittion]

I have found a couple of sellers on ebay.

But they are asking nearly £100 GBP!

[vuittion]

I have found a UK supplier and have ordered the Silverstone EB01 in the colour silver, hopefully it will compliment my Green Solo.

Total cost with next day delivery was £75.

Hopefully if all goes well I can at last get rid of my CD player and use my pc as the source, flac files lovely flac files, ogg files nice.

Can anyone give me any advice on what is the best way to use the DAC with my computer, ie can I use winamp to play my music and then run it into my Green Solo, any help would be appreciated.

I have windows vista premium if that makes any difference.

Heres a link to the website.http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=353894

Thank-you mrarroyo for recommending me the Dac, ill let you know how it sounds when I receive it and set it up with the Green solo.

[mrarroyo]

vuittion, good luck w/ the Silverston EB01, it is a nice unit at a nice price and it has a nice sound.

[vuittion]

mrarroyo do you have any tips on what media player I should use to playback through the DAC and into my Green solo.

Also I have been reading that i need to install asio drivers to get the best out of the DAC, I am a little confused on what I need to do exactly, I want the best possible audio playback through my solo, any chance in helping me out, even though i dont have the DAC of yet I would like to be prepared, or are the drivers that come with windows vista preimium good enough for the DAC, I have never used a PC as the source to connect up to an amp, only ever a CD Player.

Many thanks.

[Spirit]

vuittion,

You could use asio drivers, if these are available (will come with the product if they exist - there aren't any on the manufacturers website that I can see). If you go down this route, foobar2000 is probably easiest in terms of setup, though I think winamp now has a reasonable asio output.

I prefer the sound of Winamp + Audioburst FX... no need for asio drivers specifically going down this route.

Advantage to Asio is you have the possibility of your output being 'bitperfect' - bypassing the windows audio stack...
This was really only an issue in XP - kmixer wasn't well designed - vista is fine in terms of audio.

Whether you prefer the sound of bitperfect or winamp + audioburst... you'll have to tell me

[mrarroyo]

vuittion, I use iTunes as my player so not much help there. Sorry.

[rickcr42]

have had good results with

A-modded soundcard using the line out through a line trafos to lose the background "hash" from the poor ground buss used in computer sound cards-a thing i have foregone since the cards have become waaaaay to complicated busy to fuss with and have no need for since going to USB

B-Sound card SPDIF output (optical sucks unless you MUST and only that if the run is over 30 ft) to DAC with a pulse transformer at BOTH ends for proper 75 ohm termination of the line,means using BNC connectors and a true 75 ohm interconnect cable

C-USB DAC


Any/all have the potential to sound good if you optimise the software to the task.Obviously that means for USB ASIO which works equally well in either Winamp or Fubar with my choice being WinAmp because of the user interface plus having used it since version #1.

[kees]

Check out the M-audio Transit.
It's a USB soundcard and it works very well for me.

[fanboi]

I recently spent a day running a few comparisons using PCs as source to drive headphones, both with and without amplification.
Source was various .wav files ripped to a shared hard drive, plus one high bitrate VBR mp3 and one Flac file.
With 5 combinations to try, around 1/2 hour was given to each.
A number of the items tested were far from fully burned in and all I really gained were some initial impressions.
Sandyk has kindly loaned me his Voyager and that was used as amplification, this is the high gain version, with still less than optimum burn-in.
My interest in this amp is the consideration of its application as a substitute for a desktop amp for the PC based user whose primary use is portable.
I have no portable source (other than a laptop) and no "street" headphones and so tested using studio quality, home use headphones, specifically K701.

I tested,
Monica2 USB NOS DAC -> Voyager -> K701
M-audio Firewire audiophile 24/96 -> K701
" " " " -> Voyager -> K701
Terratec DMX 6 Fire 24/96 -> K701
" " " " -> Voyager -> K701

Points of note here, first I believe the M-audio and the Terratec to share the same primary Envy24 chip, secondly the M-audio has had but little use and may well improve with burn-in, thirdly the Monica2 DAC was also little used, maybe 150 hrs (it now has had a further 200 hrs plus and is much improved as also is the Voyager)

Impressions, initially the Monica2 was disappointing when checked against the reference of the headphone out of a Marantz 52 SE - which drove the K701 surprisingly well, albeit at almost full output for a reasonable (not head-banging) volume.
Changing the cheapo 2 RCA -> mini-TRS to a pair of credible interconnects into a 2RCA/miniTRS adapter improved this markedly and this interconnect pair were used for all subsequent tests.
Still, this combination trailed both of the soundcards. The M-audio also did a credible job of driving the K701, again with some volume limitation. This combination, definitely benefited from being fed to the Voyager and the SQ was more than acceptable.
The Terratec was the surprise, the headphone socket on the front panel of this soundcard drove the K701 with power and authority and plenty of power in reserve, I did not turn the volco over 12 o'clock and was impressed by the bass performance of this combination, sufficiently that I dropped out of testing mode for a little and tried some head banging tracks, some from Led Zeppelin and some from Prodigys Fat of the Land - anyone who thinks the K701 are bass shy should try this combo, it rocks.
Consequently, adding the Voyager did not offer any great advantage over this pairing.

Addendum, 10 days later
With an additional 250 hrs on both the Voyager and the USB DAC and testing using the W1000 headphones, the SQ of both units is markedly improved, while still not in the class of the Solo with the W1000, I did compare the two side by side from exactly the same source files/PC via the same DAC and the difference, whilst still in favour of the Solo was much less one-sided than previously.

Tentative conclusion, depending on the quality and abilities of the soundcard, the Voyager might well serve as a substitute for a desktop amp for a user whose primary need is a portable amp but who would also like to use full size headphones when at home and sourcing from a PC.
It is also worth noting, that both of these soundcards are more expensive than the USB DAC, the Terratec is discontinued and only suitable for a desktop computer, the M-audio, being firewire can be used with a suitably equipped laptop or a Macintosh.
I do feel that the Monica2 DAC has more improvement to come and there a couple of tweaks that may help that.
Miguel has noted elsewhere that the lower gain version of the Voyager gives other SQ benefits.
I did not utilise the contour switch, this has been reported on elsewhere.
Hope this may be of use to some.
Forgot to mention, OS Win XP and 2000, using ASIO drivers, ASIO4all with the USB DAC and Foobar 2000 as player.

[Deleted]

Tony
It could be worthwhile trying the Voyager again from your Terratec soundcard after the revision is done. It seems that most people would find Voyager more than adequate for a quality PC headphone amplifier, as well as it's intended use ?
Even though Voyager was nowhere near burned in when I tried it in conjunction with my Creative X-FI soundcard, it showed great promise when using my Sony
MDR CD780 headphones. I expect it would sound much better again with the ATH W1000s
Alex

[rowuk]

I use an M-Audio FastTrack Pro from time to time and have had fantastic results. The headphone output is a bit to low for the AKG K-701 - I need to open it up and see what they are using for an analogue amp. Maybe there would be a good mod........

[fanboi]

I was interested to discover, whilst looking at/for other things, that Werner of tnt-audio has a Terratec Phase 26 USB soundcard, which is still being produced, and appears to be virtually identical to the I/O module attached to my DMX 6 Fire.
Might be worth a look.

[lini]

Most of the Terratec cards are fairly good (mostly excluded: the ones based on C-Media chips). I'm not entirely sure about the DMX 6fire anymore, but I suppose it also used Terratec's usual headphone amp configuration on the internal module they've already been using in a lot of different models, which mainly consists consists a dual opamp followed by four transistors (two per channel).

On some models that headphone amp section has a hardware volume control (usually using a pot of reasonable quality - e.g. the one inside the Aureon 7.1 FireWire looks like a small Alps...), on others (e.g. Aureon 5.1 Sky/7.1 Space) it hasn't. It's not as refined as good separate headphone amps (especially with low impedance headphones), but does quite a fair job and doesn't give up as quickly as the usual opamp-based line/headphone-outs on most other soundcards, when confronted with older high impedance & low efficiency phones...

The consumer-oriented Aureon 7.1 FireWire is quite nice on the whole, btw - and just like the technically very similar semi-pro-oriented Phase 24 FireWire it can also be configured to work as a standalone dac. The only thing one really needs to know for running these firewire interfaces is that some dumbo from MS has changed the default speed of the firewire ports from 400/auto detect to 100 Mbps, when they introduced XP SP2 - which the Terratecs don't like very much. Hence one usually needs to install an MS patch and might also have to add a certain registry entry (usually already generated by the patch, but that doesn't always work...) in order to cure the problems and avoid frustration.

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini

[fanboi]

Thanks for that info Lini, have not dismantled the module for the 6 Fire so have no idea what is inside, but your description of the head amp section sounds very much like what I was hearing in terms of the driving capability, and it does have a separate volume control.

The tip re SP2 and firewire may be useful to know as I also have an M-audio firewire unit, although the machine it is running off is still at SP1.

Have just acquired a Phase 26 USB box, will pick it up tomorrow, be interesting to see how it compares to the DMX.

Tweaked the voltages on the Monica2 USB DAC the other day, it now has a good few more hours on it and is sounding much better than my initial impressions posted here earlier, particularly into the Voyager, does not seem to have as much power to drive a line as the Terratec, but having kicked up the voltage to the I/V converter I can probably change the values of the output resistors and increase the output some and perhaps improve its line driving ability.

[tarkovsky]

When you rip CDs I recommend using 'CD paranoia' which is a bit of software designed to get a very accurate image of the CD through error correction and multi pass ripping as PC CD drives are not well suited to reading audio. It was developed for linux, I use Max which is the mac version and apparently this cdexos.sourceforge.net/ is a windows integration of CD paranoia. This only has FLAC for its lossless but you will probably be able to find a cdparanoia plugin for your preffered bit of software.

As an aside does anyone know whether there is any software to read DVD-A for mac?

[toad]

I use Exact Audio Copy. I've known it to take an hour and a half to rip a difficult disc. The end result is excellent though. It has a database of drives and if you have more than one atached it will tell you which to use.

Most of my rips are rated at 100% or 99.9% for quality. The worst I have seen was 99.6%

It's a very good tool but quite complex to configure.

[Deleted]

Most people use E.A.C. As Toad says, it is a very good tool.

SandyK

[XTRProf]

Ya, EAC the best. Use it in secure mode with the drive scanning like hell option for the best results. Sorry, I'm not sure what's the option name as I'm not in front of EAC GUI.


Updated (6th Dec 2007): Secure Paranoid option on the EAC! Ta, ta .......

[tarkovsky]

It would be a very good tool, if it was on a mac.