lugili

Interesting. I never thought about something like that. All the Entreq equipment looks quite "expensive" though for quite an easy task - as it seems on first sight, but I might be wrong. Is there alternatives around and have other people experience on this subject?

Same here.

No one tried to answer my questions some time ago ... sniff ... any luck shortly before Christmas? ;-)

Hi all, I am a happy mpdpup user on an Alix machine. But now I am helping someone setting a BBB up as described at the beginning of this thread. BTW, thanks Chris for doing that, it is a great how. Would have loved to have such help 3 years ago when I started going down the slippery slope of linux audio ...;-) Can I ask a few questions: - what "nice" level is mpd running on the BBB? where can I change it to -19 if necessary? anyone done that yet? we could not see mpd with "ps -axl" - what are people using as buffer sizes in mpd.conf without dropouts and for best sound? we had dropouts with high res files - chris set nrpacks to 1, I use nrpacks = 20 for better results on the Alix. Is there a consensus what is best here? Thanks and sorry for the techy questions. lugili

Just to add another alternative for people who have touched a soldering iron before and do not scare away from a little bit of diy: I use the amb sigma 11 to power my sotm card, and I find the sound improvement quite significant. The σ11 Regulated Power Supply The total cost of all parts is less than 100 USD, maybe one afternoon to put it all together once you have all the parts. The sigma 11 has very good reviews on head-fi and other sites and I think rightly so. My atom board is powered by a kingrex psu (13V DC output, but the motherboard does not mind that it is not 12V).

Juliocat, any news regarding your setup yet? I am currently facing the same problem and would be interested in your findings. ;-)

Antipodes_audio, I had the Weiss DAC 202 connected via firewire to my ubuntu studio setup about 2 years ago. As I live close to Weiss in Switzerland I had some help form the guys there and Daniel. They were working on their own server (MAN) which runs XMMS not mpd as far as I remember (meaning it is also a linux machine). I had to install ffado and jack in addtion to mpd and change the sample rates manually in jack if there was need to. It worked up to 24/96 bit perfect (I tested it with the Weiss files) but not higher. I stopped using it then but it was a fun project. As far as I know the internal dac in the new MAN setup is also connected to the computer-board via firewire. At least that is what I understood from Daniel when I saw him a few weeks ago on a show. Weiss must have solved the problem though (including automatic sample rates switching, etc.) for linux with XMMS. Maybe you may want to ask them what to do, they are very nice people. Just my two cents.

Voyage mpd

Just another happy owner of an Alix with Voyage MPD and having replaced the stock Wallwart with a Kingrex linear PSU. Sounds sooo much better than before. I used a CAPS 1 server with all sorts of Linux distros before (Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, etc,) and all sorts of tweaks (low latency, use only one CPU for MPPD, etc.) and this Alix now beats all of them hands down. Invest in a linear PSU, it is worth it! I always wanted to go down the route of CAPS 2 with the SOTM USB card but I now think that the Alix with linear PSU is probably the better (or as good a) choice. And much cheaper ;-) Ticks all my boxes.

In another thread a project with voyage mpd on alix is shortly discussed. Nick (nyc_paramedic, also around here) is the guru for this. http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/ALIX-Project Probably beats any Mac/Windows setup on sound quality ... but I am not going there ;-) I have a similar setup but based on Lubuntu/MPD and Atom-Board that is a bit more expensive (but maybe easier to start with). Still beolow 500 USD though. Find some helpful stuff here: https://sites.google.com/site/computeraudioorg/ Best of luck.

BushPilot, you may want to give Lubuntu a try instead of Ubuntu. It is also a full featured distro but lighter than Ubuntu. With respect to sound, it has only ALSA installed and no Pulseaudio (as Ubuntu does) which you do not need and is competing with ALSA. The load on my Atom processor is about 1% when I run MPD with GMPC as client. Dynobot who is also around here some times has also some quite interesting tweaking ideas (use only one processor core for mpd) on his page (hope he does not mind putting it here): https://sites.google.com/site/computeraudioorg/ To my ears, my Lubuntu server (with general kernel) sounds significantly better than the Ubuntu setup (with and without low latency kernels) that I had before. From my experience MPD is bit perfect. I was able to check this once with a Weiss DAC 202 that I had on loan. According to the guys at Weiss I was the only guy around who connected the Weiss by Firewire to Linux (mpd, alsa, ffado), and then you can check it as they have special files. Weiss were at the time working on the MAN 202 which has also Linux inside, although not mpd.

Hi k-man, are you sure the dcs is not galvanically isolated?

I assume that using the SOTM Sata filter together with the SOTM USB Audio card has the best effect regarding noise reduction. In case you have a galvanically isolated USB async. DAC attached (in my case dcs debussy) and you want to pick one of the products, is the effect of the SATA filter or the USB card more significant? The answer is probably: it depends ... ;-). But I ask anyway. Maybe someone has some experience.

Cool stuff. I run an ubuntu based mpd server (itx) but am looking in finding something smaller. Will give that setup a thought. Thanks and happy listening.

This looks like a very interesting setup. Can you elaborate a bit more regarding the plugcomputers? Is it two machines or just one? Do you run it/them headless? Thanks.