Soundstation: 1 - Theory & hardware
1a - The requirements
- the PC has to have at least one optical digital out to be used to be connected to the amplifier. I experimented a little bit with the normal stereo cables but I saw that when some songs had sudden volume peaks, the music propagated by the amplifier was attenuated. I therefore decided to go 100% digital.
- I want to store a lot of songs and I don't want to have any problems with capacity.
- I want to have some kind of remote control to control which songs are played (volume is taken care by the amplifier).
- I don't want to have any keyboard in the living room.
- A remote control isn't sufficient to to handle a big list of songs (scroll the list, create the playlist, etc...). I therefore need as well something else.
- I don't want to have any background noise while listening to music.
At the beginning I was focusing only to the part which concerns the music, but after a while I thought: if I will have a PC in my living room, why not using it as well for playing movies?
This sounds quite easy, but with the time passing by this second wish proved to be a major problem. Having to play movies implies the available storage space to be much bigger, the PC to be much powerful (playing a movie encoded in x264 need a lot of processing power) and to have a good TV output, which in turn means the need to have one more available PCI slot to be used for an additional TV card (not just the one integrated in the motherboard). And don't forget that in the end all this power generates heat which has to be somehow dissipated, probably using fans, which generates even more background noise together with the harddisk and the cdrom.
After two attempts I temporarely dropped the movie part of the requirement - I will perhaps implement it in an alternative way.
1b - Choose the right hardware
The first components I had to choose was the case, the motherboard and the processor.
My first choice was a Silverstone LC11
with a ECS/Elitegroup K8M800-M2 motherboard for an AMD Sempron 2600 CPU. The case is small enough to fit into my rack and the CD-tray is hidden - quite nice. The motherboard and processor were cheap but still quite powerful. I didn't use an active cooling for the CPU, but instead a huge NT01
of Silverstone (which I bent to be able to install it in the case).
This solution offers 2 PCI and 1 AGP slots, which I used to install a graphic card, a sound card and a TV-card.
Everything at the beginning was running fine (with the CPU reaching during peak times more than 80 degrees Celsius, but still without crashing) but after a while the fan of the case started being noisy - aahh!!
The second choice was the barebone Asus Pundit P1-AH1
with an AMD 4800 X2 CPU (AMD CPUs are perhaps not as powerful as Intel's, but they're definetely cheaper).
I chose an Asus because I already had in the past such a barebone (the first model of Pundit) and I was impressed by its reliability.
Here you have free 2 PCI slots, using one for the soundcard and one for the TV-out card (video card is already on-board).
This solution would have worked if I wouldn't have got scared of the fans stopping running and my flat starting to burn. I know the CPU would automatically shut down in such a case, but I just couldn't psychologically stop thinking about this possibility :oP
For the third choice I therefore decided to opt for a passively cooled system, trying to avoid any kind of problem with hardware having moving parts (fans) and therefore aging and breaking down or becoming noisy. I went for a Silverstone LC09 case
with a VIA EPIA SP-8000E Mini-ITX motherboard an its integrated C3 800Mhz processor.
It has apparently an integrated mpeg2 & mpeg4 hardware accelleration, which I will test to see how well my x264 movies run. The case has an external 80W power supply (passively cooled) and both the case and the mainboard have space for one additional PCI card, which I will use for the audio card if I won't be able to use the on-board PCA connection for digital-audio-out, or for the TV-Card if I am.
I got the mainboard, but not yet the case, so I will tell you in in a few lines how this one runs.
The second group of component was the screen.
I didn't want to use the TV-screen as output device (turning on and off the TV each time I want to listen to some songs??), and I had the need for an advanced user interface (as I said, a classical remote control isn't enough when you have to create playlists), so I decided to use a touchscreen. I chose the Xenarc 700YYV 7'' touchscreen (I think the YYV is only for Switzerland - its original name is probably 700TSV) because of not being too big or too small:
It is Linux- and Windows-compatible and its native resolution is 800x480 (fonts are too small - I'm running it with 640x480). It has an in-built loudspeaker which I disconnected after opening the case (so, forget about the warranty buddy) because it was generating all the time some background noise.
I additionally tried to use VNC (remote desktop) and connect my PDA to the machine. It works, but the performance isn't great - might work better in the future after an update or changing the compression algorithm.
The third and last group were the harddisk, CDRW, and remote control.
I used a Samsung 7200rpm 3.5 harddisk, a Plextor CDRW and as remote control the one delivered with the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR350, which worked fine. To be honest, when I will get the new LC05 case I will go back to a 5400rpm harddisk as the 7200 are just a little bit too noisy and low rotating speed means as well less heat. The Plextor was great at reading all protected CDs I have.
Chapter 1 - Theory & hardware <= You are here
Chapter 2 - Initial setup
Chapter 3 - Jukebox music setup
Chapter 4 - CPU throttling & Co.
Chapter 5 - Watch movies
Back to Soundstation main