jnoneiliv1

Well, I installed the PICO PSU and I could get the system to boot with the PCI card installed, but I cannot get Windows to load. It gets through POST fine and the Bios appears to recognize the PCI card and assign an interrupt etc., but Windows just hangs at the first splash screen. I think I'm about done trying to get the SOTM card to work, for now. I'm not the only one who's had problem with the card and there is no support for it. SOTM has dropped all reference to the PCI version from their website, only the PCIe version is still made. So, this starts to feel a little too much DIY, grope in teh dark, for me. Nothing wrong with that, I just don't have that kind of time unless it's necessary. I still think building a dedicated headless music server with the Jetway board to mostly CAPS 2 design is a worthwhile excercise. Just building the system without the PCI card is a snap. The board appears quite happy running Win7 although it does have a little mechanical noise as reported elsewhere by others. I don't think it's worth worrying about though. Jamie

Those heat pipes are so cool! Real Hot Rod looking.

Pico PSU to the rescue. Here's a pic of the Pico PSU. It is shown with the power on pin jumped to ground. It will always be on when plugged into the 12 volt source. This will be connected to the SOTM card. If I can avoid being lazy I'll wire a switch into the jumper and put it onto the CAPS 2 case so I can switch on the power to the SOTM card. I'm not sure it's really necessary though. Jamie

Not off topic at all. Thanks for sharing. I've ordered a pico psu and another 12v switcher supply. I'll just jump the power on wires from the pico's atx bundle to keep the pico on all the time. I have all my music on a nas. Wish it was in another room, or better yet buried in a bunker. It works fine but it's noisy. It was pretty cool loading windows to the capsv2 jetway. No fan, silent as a mouse. Can't wait to try out the little headless monster. Jamie

This begs the question of how necessary is the SOTM USB card given the problems it is creating with this motherboard. I was really looking forward to a nice, simple, quiet box as music server. One power cord, low power, no fan, could stay on all the time, there's no spinning hard drive, headless, etc. Now to need to use a separate power supply for the card could be overkill for me. I'm still curious as to how Chris could have made the first build if a couple of us can't get the motherboard to power on with the SOTM card connected and the SOTM card wasn't cheap, but maybe there's plenty of value in this nice, quiet, low power motherboard with a clean OS, Win 7, and a good player software. There will be no other devices plugged into the motherboard usb bus, running headless. These little atom processors are pretty cool. Jamie

Thanks Stuart. It really helps knowing I'm not the only one. The initial rush idea makes sense, I think the board has some voltage trip limits and it might be seeing a drop it thinks is like a short. I knew folks had modded this with separate power. I was hoping for some more immediate gratification. But I've got another cas that has a typical pc psi with lots of plugs. I was real close to using it but I couldn't figure out how to get the front panel switch to start both power sources. Cheers, Jamie

Help! I'm building a CAPS V2 server. I bought all the components some time ago when CAPS 2 was current. So, I have the CA spec'd Jetway motherboard and the SOTM USB PCI card. The Jetway motherboard gets power by way of a 12 volt external switching supply plugged into a barrel connector on the motherboard. Both the SSD hard drive and the SOTM PCI card get their power from the motherboard. There is one 4 pin Molex connection on the motherboard that is connected to the SATA SSD drive and the USB card. I think it would be correct to say the motherboard sees the DC power connections as loads in parrallel. I believe all of this is standard CAPS 2 setup, same model number of the motherboard, same model of SOTM card, but the SSD is not the same spec. I can get the system to power up through POST with either the USB card connected to power, OR the SSD SATA drive, but not both. I've pulled the USB card out of the PCI slot, and just connected the 4 pin power. But, with both connected the Led light on the power button will just momentarily light up, a click from the motherboard, and then nothing. I need to unplug the power supply and plug it back in to restart the system successfully with either the driver or the USB card connected, but not both. I can only guess that the motherboard power supply does not like seeing the lower resistance load of both devices? But, this arrangement of power should be the standard CAPS V2 design. I believe it is the power cable that came with the motherboard that has 2 SATA connectors, one of which has an adapter for the 4 pin connector to the USB card. I'm stuck. Jamie

I'm curious because I'm building a CAPS V2, I've had the parts for over a year, and I was looking for power supply upgrade suggestions, and I really don't understand the suggestions made here, they seam to miss some really obvious upgrade paths within the CAPS paradigm. Jamie

I am a bit confused as to the replies to this post. The OP is saying he is not using the Sotm USB card in is CAPS V2. Isn't that a key part of the whole approach of Cap V2? Wouldn't this be an obvious upgrade to his CAP V2 server within the budget mentioned? If the USB card was worth it as part of the original CAPS build and I thought really one of the key components which make the CAP different than a shrinkwrap PC, why would that not be a recommended upgrade? What am I missing here? Cheers, Jamie

I love this thread. I am guilty of DAC collecting. Cheap e-bay nos DAC, inexpensive asynchronous USB DAC, more expensive audiogon DAC. always planning to complete home reference to listen to all and prove I can hear a difference before next upgrade. Of course now I have vinyl also. Help!

To David's original question, which I understand to mean whether he could use one file format for both the PC/JRiver world AND the MAC /Ipod/Itunes world, I would think AIFF is the best choice. Broadly compatible in both the MAC and PC world, good tagging support, and some folks believe it is a superior format for good quality reproduction. I think the HDTracks recommendation is just a "heads up" that keeping one toe into FLAC might be a good idea just for convenience in case David would like to try out some HiRez files, and Chris H. makes a good case in the CA Ripping guide for ripping simultaneously to two different formats for some extra insurance of file to player compatibility. Given AIFF's footing in the Pro community, just reading between the lines of some of the pro posters here at CA, I would think AIFF is fairly future proof, and there would always be a software tool to convert it over to something else in the future, but I know I feel better having my CD's in both FLAC and AIFF format. I don't use the FLAC files, but take some comfort knowing I have them, and when making copies of my entire library en masse, sometimes I like having the flexibility of moving around .5T instead of 1T of data. But also to David's point, IMHO, I would say "NO" don't worry about storage, Moore's law and all (yes I know it applies to transistors and not magnetic storage). Even using my Ipod classic, I've seen no real loss of convenience using full size, uncompressed AIFF on my Ipod. Just not as many albums. And, of course there are now 250 Gig Ipod's by the Ipod crackers. To step further out on a limb, IMHO, I would avoid WAV files since they do not embed tagging. Again, a pro might have different reasons for using WAV, but as a somewhat convenience oriented listener like myself or I'm thinking David as well, having a music library with files that could become disassociated with their meta data is an accident waiting to happen. Cheers, James

The CA Ripping Guide right here on CA is an excellent primer on CD ripping. The CA guide uses dBPowerAmp, but everything else about the strategy and recommendations is Mac and PC compatible. IMHOP I think you'll be best served to rip to AIFF for best ITunes support and later comparability with other players, libraries, and PC's or MAC's. ITunes nor IPods support Flac. That said, Chris H. Makes a good case for ripping two copies, in two different formats, for most secure archiving of ripped CD data. It's a rip once forever idea.

David, I use AIFF format files similiar to Barry. Here's the advantages as I see them: 1. Agnostic to the compressed versus not compressed debate, it is a non compressed format, so your safe regardless. 2. AIFF format has good tagging support, so if your files get orphaned from your library, they have their medical Id bracelets. 3. AIFF is mostly universally supported by all players, PC, MAC, and IPod. It has no apple proprietary itching powder, but runs nicely on the IPod. With a large capacity classic I can carry around a lot of music and my car deck has it's own DAC that uses raw digital from the IPod. That being said I follow the CA ripping guide and also keep a Flac copy of all my CD's. It can be good to keep yourself Flac capable as the file compression (lossless) can be useful for hi res downloads. The irony of the worry about whether a bit perfect file stored on the hd in compressed format sounds less good, is that if you also believe higher Rez files sound better you'll probably have an easier time purchasing and downloading Flac files, which comes full circle back to compressed data. HDTracks unequivocally recommends FLAC for hi Rez downloads. Right or wrong, if you want hi Rez, some things are going to only be in Flac, so the debate seams a bit irrelevant IMHOP. But most of the other folks here know a lot more than I. Cheers, James

More! Blog that is. I'll be disappointed if the image doesn't open up for you after all the hard work. Cheers.

Chip, I use my Ipad as a remote for my MacBook Pro with Itunes and it is very simple and effective. Most of the discussions I've seen tend to say that the MacBook or MacMini's are excellent music players. You can do just as well with a PC, but the Mac's were engineered for audio since a long time ago. I remember ages ago meeting the sound engineer for Bruce Hornsby and seeing his home setup with Mac Quadra or something mixing his CD's. There are things I don't like about Itunes, but the first time I sat down with my Ipad with my entire music library available to me at the touch of my finger to the screen was REALLY cool and the way that all the Mac stuff talks to each other about music is pretty cool. With an Airport Express or the other standard Apple wireless stuff, you can stream music anywhere in your house for a ridiculous cheap price. Most of the proprietary itching powder of Itunes has been removed and it's much less confining than it used to be. I think you'll be hard pressed to beat the performance of the MacMin and DacMagic combination and you'll have a sweet all Cambridge stack. I use any old PC and DbPowerAmp per the CA Ripping guide found on this site and store all my music on a NetGear Duo NAS. My MacBook and Itunes sees the NAS drive over my network drive just fine and I just import the music to the Itunes library, but make sure you check the little box that says to leave the music files in place instead of copying to the library. I like having my music files in one big directory unmolested by Itunes that I can copy, backup, however I like without worrying about the Itunes library structure. Or, you could just use a simple USB Hard Drive that would plug into any machine that is ripping your music, PC or Mac and then plug it into the MacMini. You could have two USB Drives for redundancy, or just have one USB Drive to move music around and backup the MacMini. Whatever you do, make sure you keep at least two copies of your music on two different hard drives. I just assume ALL hard drives are crap and WILL fail when you least expect it. I think I could prove this statistically, but either way, it's the only best operating assumption about hard drives and data protection. Don't ever even worry about whether a hard drive is good or not, they're all crap (even if they're not). Just buy two and plan to throw one in the trash when you least expect it, right after you've just loaded hours of new music. Cheers, Jamie