An audio-video replay system I'm happy with

Silent, fast, extendible, easy to use - what more could I desire?    

This week

By the end of the 1930s, German sound recording equipment was already well ahead of any other - the first tape recorders had been used for orchestral concerts, and sound quality was not only second to none but improving further. So it comes as no great surprise to hear some fabulous sound from Mark Obert-Thorn's 1940 Mengelberg transfers this week.

The recordings in question concern his only recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic, both of music by Tchaikovsky, and both recorded together across two days in July 1940. Anyone who knows their Mengelberg will know what to expect - an incredible elasticity of tempo unthinkable today, yet surely adhering to the tradition in which Tchaikovsky himself existed.

Mark's put a huge amount of work into these transfers and it's paid off brilliantly - it's rare that he sends me a completed album and then withdraws it to reconsider some small detail, but in this case Mark decided more tweaks were needed to counteract "gain riding" by Telefunken's recording engineers, something that adds even further refinement to a superb release.

Meanwhile, after five weeks of Furtwängler's Brahms, I thought it only right to offer an alternative view from Arturo Toscanini. It's actually not that often that I've worked on his "studio" recordings, as opposed to the radio broadcasts, and it was refreshing to be outside of the stultifying deadness of Studio 8H and into the more congenial acoustic of Carnegie Hall - not to mention the lack of any audience noise to temper.

One reason I've tended to avoid the studio recordings is their continuous availability from Sony-RCA. Only this year a big box set (which I gather is largely a reissue of an earlier box set) has been released, and being keen to make sure I wasn't wasting my time before tackling all four symphonies I ordered a copy and set them up against my own work.

To be honest, if all four had been on a level with the first two symphonies I might have considered working on something else. The sound quality on RCA's current CDs is certainly adequate here, though still not without room for improvement. But the third and fourth both sounded like something from five or ten years earlier and were far from satisfactory.

Furthermore there was evidence of tape speed drift in all four symphonies, and in the Third I discovered the second half of the first movement, and all of the fourth, were both almost a quarter-tone sharp of the rest of the piece.

So yes, there was work to be done - and I'm very pleased with the results. The four symphonies now match each other for sound quality, and within each symphony all sorts of interior anomalies have been ironed out - not only in pitch but variable hiss levels and other such flaws.

With the added benefits of XR remastering the end result is a coherent and consistent document of all four symphonies in excellent, full and rich sound, all of it a marked improvement on the latest RCA reissues. There's also the added benefit of being able to fit all four symphonies onto two CDs, something Furtwängler's pacing rules out!

I'll be leaving Brahms alone for a short while now, but in the meantime if you missed Furtwängler's take on the four symphonies, we've put together a "virtual box set" download of those four symphony releases, together with their accompanying material, available online from any of the Furtwängler Brahms symphony pages, or order directly by clicking here.


Finally a reminder again that there will be no new releases on 6th July, 24 and 31 August, and that increasing hard drive prices coupled with ever-increasing content will see a price rise for our Digital Music Collection drives from the start of August. Precise details are still to be settled but I expect an increase of around 10% over current prices.



So here it is - an inexpensive home PC-based audio-video system

I've sort of written this article before, or one like it, and it could probably be largely pieced together from columns here over the past weeks and months, but there's no harm in summing up where I'm at with a comprehensive music and video system based around hard drive storage, wi-fi - and no silver or black plastic discs.

Like most good hi-fi systems, it takes a modular approach, allowing me to swap individual components in and out as I like. Although it reflects something of a do-it-yourself approach, as technology improves and systems get better at connecting to each other without the need for detailed expert technical intervention, assembling something like this now sits more and more within the realm of the enthusiastic amateur rather than the tech boffin. (How well I remember the time it used to take to persuade a new modem or sound card to work under Windows 3.1 - usually 3-4 days in my case!)


The thinking behind this approach is simple: to replace all of my replay devices with a single unit capable of delivering high resolution, 24-bit sound and high definition TV pictures. I don't include the TV, amplifier or loudspeakers in this definition - those are questions for another day - it's entirely to do with what's being delivered to those components and how, and how I've replaced machines that play discs, tapes and so on with a single integrated computer-based player with direct access to my entire music and video collection.

Working back from the replay end then is perhaps one way to describe it. The TV end-point is possibly the simplest, thanks to the widespread adoption of HDMI, the single digital cable which transfers pictures and sound (and additional control information) to a screen. With an HDMI socket on a PC you can deliver all the data without any digital-to-analogue decoding, directly to the TV - thus the requirement for expensive specialist picture-decoding hardware at the PC end is lifted and costs are cut. It's a simple system for the user, works brilliantly, and need trouble us no more - the TV handles the digital signal and for the purposes of this article, which isn't a TV review, we can leave the television to worry about how it manages that.

Sound may be a little more complicated, depending on your set-up. Some amplifiers will take a direct digital signal. Others you can pass the HDMI signal through on its way to the TV. Either of these may suit you - though in the case of the former you do need to have a compatible digital audio source, optical or wired, and not all sound cards or PCs will supply this.

Option three is good old analogue sound, which is my only option at present. My rather ageing Rotel pre- and power-amp set up was not designed for the digital input era and needs a traditional line input from some kind of digital-to-analogue converter.

You may at this point have three analogue output options: an audio output from the TV might be available. In this instance you'll be relying on the TV's sound converters, which may or may not be great. There's always likely to be a 1/8" stereo output socket on the PC, but I wouldn't hold out much hope for high sound quality there!

 Finally there's the approach I've adopted: an external sound box which takes a digital signal over a USB cable and turns it into an analogue signal using specialist converters, located well away from the electrically-noisy insides of the average PC. I opted for a device designed for professional musicians to make recordings "in the field", made by Roland and not painfully pricey. It delivers excellent sound quality and can happily handle a wide range of sampling rates and bit depths as required. It sits right behind the pre-amp and the two are connected by short, high-quality phono leads.

Now we've worked our way back to the device at the heart of the system, which you may remember from last week:

Shuttle Barebone XS35GTV2 PC

This little box, costing just over €200, demonstrates a somewhat unusual design aesthetic in the PC world: it's built without any moving parts, using convection air currents and low-energy chips to keep temperatures down and do away with the need for any cooling fans.

When you buy this box you'll need to be ready to add components to it - but as it's an à la carte system you do get to choose what you want (and can afford). I dropped in €20-worth of memory (4GB) and an SSD drive I already owned (rather than a whirring disc drive) with a copy of Windows 7 already on it. The device offers an SD card reader and a USB port on the front (there are more USB ports behind), and for the sake of putting the utmost flexibility into it, I also added a slot-loading BluRay DVD/CD - though I rarely expect to use it, it may come in handy one day. To be honest, there was a CD-player-sized gap there, so I thought I might as well fill it!

I use XBMC to replay my music and video. I've recommended this and found some people really don't like it. It's a non-commercial system and to be honest someone needs to write a proper manual for it, but once you've got it working it's great. That said, if all you want to play is music then it's probably not for you - try Songbird instead.

XBMC has the added advantage for me of having a version which, with extra hardware, allows me full control from the TV remote, finally making the whole system feel really integrated in use. I still have a wireless combination keyboard/trackpad, but since getting the remote control working this is getting much less use and spends most of its time in its charger cradle.

There's also an additional PC monitor attached to my system, which splits its video output across the two screens (the mouse pointer jumps from one to the other, for example), which is also seeing less use now I'm operating XBMC almost exclusively through the TV using the regular TV remote. The PC system is set up to start up, connect to all my network drives, then run XBMC and turn the TV on all from the press of the PCs power switch.

Of course you need some content to play, and that's all stored on large RAID-equipped hard disk drives and servers in our office, which sits two floors above the living room. Because the house and the business run off two entirely separate power supplies we can't use perhaps the simplest way of connecting the hard drive network to the replay PC, which would be through a power-supply network. This system piggy-backs your house's mains electricity wiring and sends high speed network signals across it, and I'm assured it does a very good job of it too.

But in our case, short of re-cabling the building, wi-fi is the best answer. The main network is linked by a Netgear dual-band N900 wireless router. This is capable of delivering up to 450Mbps simultaneously on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz wavebands - allowing me to set up other devices on the 2.4GHz band and reserve the 5GHz connection purely for audio and video use. This means when my son is watching YouTube videos on his bedroom PC it doesn't interfere with the high-definition movie that's streaming to our TV! A small Trendnet USB wi-fi device in the living room retrieves the music and video data and feeds it into the PC - and since we upgraded from a slower, single-band connection we've had excellent, uninterrupted delivery of any video or music we've wanted to view or listen to. File transfers are also as good as (or better than) you might have found on a wired network until very recently - in use it feels like wi-fi has really started to catch up with its wired equivalent.

I touched briefly on the hard drives. We have lots of these here at Pristine! Admittedly a good number of them are dedicated to my work, but I've learned the hard way to err on the side of caution and always use a dual-drive RAID1 set-up for each drive housing my music and video collection. The rather fat boxes that deliver this essentially function like any other external hard drive, either on the network or via USB cables, but crucially the two drives inside each box contain the same data, so if one fails the other retains a full copy and nothing should ever be lost - it's ensuring a permanent and continuous back-up of the full collection.

The main video drive is what's known as a "NAS" - Network-attached Storage - which means it's essentially a hard drive with a simple PC inside to handle network access and manage the discs. Whilst this costs more than a simple external box that will connect directly to your PC over a USB cable, it means it can operate independently of any other computer on a network, so it's always available even if your PC is switched off or out of action. NAS drives usually come with additional media software, which in our case means the TV is capable of playback directly from the NAS using its own built-in wi-fi connection. That said, the TV's interface is dreadful and I never use it! The NAS also allows a secondary drive to be added, using its own USB interface, so a dedicated audio drive can piggy-back onto its network service, again operating without a main PC, but costing less than two NAS drives.

Ultimately the whole set-up now delivers a slick and seamless audio and video library and replay service. The computer software scans all the music and video files and automatically adds artwork, graphics, biographical data and synopses to the media, cataloguing as it does so. It's silent in operation and delivers very high quality sound to my amp and pictures to my TV.

It's taken me a long time to get to this point, and I've taken the odd wrong-turn along the way, as well as amassed a collection of now-obsolete equipment, but I feel I'm there now - there's nothing I can think of at the moment to enhance it.

Apart from a new amp and speakers that is...

 

Andrew Rose
22 June 2012