How to Make Your Own Media Centre PC - Part 1

I love having all my music on a network drive and watching everything on demand. But my PC is noisy and ugly. This is the first step of a DIY project to sort that out. 

Woody - my son - tries prog rock for the first time

About 4 years ago, my elder brother announced he was going to spend a ton of money (literally I think) on a digital audio player from Linn.

I listened carefully to his description, and could see he was very excited. But from everything he said, as far as I could tell, the Linn was just a posh DAC in a big box with a nice display.

I messed around with stand alone DACs years ago when I bought the back water known as the Atari Falcon - the first home computer to cope with viable digital audio recording and editing alongside MIDI. And I couldn't quite understand why it could possibly have cost him that much money.

Four years on, and I've jumped head and shoulders in to the networked music solution. It only took one listen to a ripped CD (FLAC format of course) through a decent DAC to know that CD players were dead. I've also spent many, many hours fiddling with network settings and cables since then and my music playback sometimes jumps and sometimes isn't available at all. But when it's working, and I'm listening to a hi-bit rate recording, it's the best darned hi-fi I've ever had for a fraction of the cost for the quality if I'd gone the traditional hardware route. The biggest enabler of this is the low cost DAC. It's also the reason I think it's worth covering in this blog. Better quality music is more enjoyable, more moving to listen to. The quality from a £50 USB DAC or from a £120 sound card brings tears to the eyes. It's worth the hours of fiddling. You'd have to spend at least £500 on a CD player to match it, and even if you spent £1k+ you wouldn't always say it was better, just different.

The way I've saved money is to use my original PC as the file player, and give it an audiophile sound card. This one, since you ask. The Asus Xonar Essence STX. If you listen to music via your PC and you don't have one, stop what you're doing and go and buy one. Now. It'll make you happier than almost anything else.

BUT, whereas my brother has an elegant 2U unit in his hi-fi shelf that always works, I have an ugly as hell PC sitting in my living room with a fan noise like a helicopter hovering permanently overhead. And sometimes it jumps (something to do with the graphics driver interferes with one of the sound settings) and it will play HD video, but only just. It's not really the ultimate home entertainment solution.

So, this post is by way of being a marker to the next stage of the project. Now I know this is the way to go. I'm going to build my own media centre PC. Following the ethos of my adventure so far, it's going to have to be from ebay components as cheap as possible for the task. And it'll have to look good in a living room. And it'll have to be quiet. How hard can it be? Watch this space!

Radio Days

As you'll see from my other blog, I'm currently a stay at home dad. I drop our four and a half year old off at school first thing, then spend the day following our one and a half year old around picking up toys, porridge, nappies etc. Which means I'm in that twilight zone of folk who spend their days at home with kids. Of course, in between mashing up pasta, I play with my own toys. 


Much of my daily tinkering is around what to listen to while I'm sitting on the floor reading the same book over and over again. And how to make sure I can hear it when I could end it up anywhere in the house. 


My CD collection was ripped long ago to FLAC and now sits on a network drive accesible from any computer in the house. It only really starts to live when heard through a decent DAC. Staggeringly, a seriously good DAC now costs about £50 (the equivalent of a £500 CD player I'd guess).  


But even with 50 days worth of music to shuffle, I've found it a bit, well, soulless. The answer I've stumbled on  is to go back to radio. Radio 4, obviously, is only bearable a few hours at a time. Radio 3 is ecstatic about one day solid a week. So, what to have on the rest of the time?


The other day I put on a high bit rate radio stream from record and hi-fi company Linn - Linn Radio. There's no presenter, no news, no weather. It's just the Linn record collection endlessly shuffled and genre filtered. And yet, the pleasure of listening to someone else's choice of  music is strangely fulfilling and connects me with others far more than hitting my own shuffle button. A little trace of adult communication while I explain again that birdies and doggies are different things.