PC for Multichannel Music Playback - What's your Setup?

[ubertrout]

I must agree with you: building and using a PC made to your own requirements can be very gratifying. The part selection is both the trickiest & most fun part to the process and after that it's mostly knowing where & what to plug into.

I really like your set up. Your wiring is neat. Mine, not so much. I would never build anything into a fancy case you can see in to. However my build is sort of the opposite of yours. Instead of compact mine is big & complex. Complex is relative tho & I am amazed at the sophistication I see from others here that put my rig to shame. Where as many of the set ups on the forum is aimed at ripping & NAS and music playback, mine is for both audio & video & up mixing.

Your Silverstone is an attractive box. For myself I opted for (IIRC) the same enclosure @Sal1950 has, a Coolermaster Cosmos 1000:

View attachment 89671

It's fairly huge with a full size ASUS MOBO and 32 GB fast & low lat RAM. It was the newest & best board available at the time that still had a full size PCI slot needed for my Delta 1010 "sound card." What I really like about this is 4 internal storage drives. One is SSD used only for Windows & apps. Even Firefox cache is moved to a storage drive. Then I have 3, 4 TB HGST drives for data. The nifty thing about this is batch process or otherwise save and read from one drive & simultaneously write to another. Really speeds things UP. The 3rd HDD is used for ripping hold or what I call short term archive, hold pieces of other projects I have yet to finish.
Video from the PC goes straight to my projector via HDMI. Audio is played back two ways. Either SPDIF into my Anthem pre-pro or analog discrete output from the Delta 1010 into the analog inputs on the Anthem.

So when I'm doing DAW stuff I can sit in my sweet spot with a wireless keyboard/mouse & look at Adobe Audition or whatever on an 8' screen. This is so much better than editing in one room/environment & listening to in another, which I think a few folks here have the challenge of.

I got started building PC's (Win XP, P4) because I wanted to capture my Moody Blues R2R quad tapes with high quality confidence. I upgraded the board for capturing un-compressed AVI from Laserdisc which was a whole 'nother set of demands. And since then I've arrived at the current build, several years old (Win 7) and it just works great. No bugs, no glitches, just does what I want and pretty fast.

This looks like a cool setup! I do some upmixing/scaling on my main PC, which is a Ryzen 5900X machine with a Radeon 6700XT graphics card. Although I've made it quieter with some liquid cooling, it's still not as quiet as I'd like for music (although since it's the main machine I do normal things on I de facto listen to more music on it than on my HTPC).

Listening mostly to classical, quiet is really important to me. The noise of fans and hard drives in the quiet parts of chamber music would just destroy the mood. Although my system has fans, they're high quality and set to run really slowly to keep the machine cool yet quiet. My previous HTPC had a hard drive in the box and I just wasn't happy hearing it.

 

[fripppp]

Nice builds!
I also built my main HTPC, many years ago (although transferred to a new case recently), with a GTX 1060, Intel Core i7 4790k, and 32gb of RAM it can do pretty much everything I throw at it. It does get a little loud at times, but only when I'm working on it (3d modelling), if its just music it's quiet enough for me. Running Windows 7, only the best. I find the later versions too buggy, ugly, slow, and bloated for my tastes All my music and pictures are stored on a separate PC that I use as a server. I was able to score that one from a thrift store for only 5$! Great specs too, i7 processor, 16gb of RAM and dedicated AMD graphics, it was only missing a hard drive, but now has 14 TB of storage and is an absolute BEAST!

 

[Sonik Wiz]

This looks like a cool setup! I do some upmixing/scaling on my main PC, which is a Ryzen 5900X machine with a Radeon 6700XT graphics card. Although I've made it quieter with some liquid cooling, it's still not as quiet as I'd like for music (although since it's the main machine I do normal things on I de facto listen to more music on it than on my HTPC).

Listening mostly to classical, quiet is really important to me. The noise of fans and hard drives in the quiet parts of chamber music would just destroy the mood. Although my system has fans, they're high quality and set to run really slowly to keep the machine cool yet quiet. My previous HTPC had a hard drive in the box and I just wasn't happy hearing it.

Wow you must have uber good hearing, Mr Trout! You probably would not much like listening to music at my place. The projector fan always makes a noticeable noise on quiet parts. But with lamp on low power it's nothing a little tinnitus can't fix. And the tinnitus can be fixed by adjusting the volume to 11.

More seriously if possible I leave the projector off & use my Oppo remote phone app. And SACD's are set default auto play in MCH, so no menu needed there.

The big PC also comes in handy for casual viewing of YouTube or otherwise stuff on the net or DL'ed files. Usually it stays off for an evening of music & movies.

 

[mandrix]

I have an HP Spectre x360 Convertible 14-ea0420nd (301Y7EA#ABH). From 2021.
I have been looking around and apparently the used adaptor is a big deal, since the laptop outputs DP over USB: the audio implementation is optional and the HDMI adaptor quality varies a lot.
I also found this document with some DP audio implementation details.

Well DP in itself is quite capable. I've used DP > HDMI adapter cables before to an AVR with good success. Over USB though I dunno. Will read your link later when time permits, but I will read it.

 

[SeeMoreDigital]

Well DP in itself is quite capable. I've used DP > HDMI adapter cables before to an AVR with good success. Over USB though I dunno. Will read your link later when time permits, but I will read it.

Agreed, I don't remember having any issues bit-streaming 'lossless' audio formats (such as: Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA) using a DisplayPort to HDMI adaptor or lead.

With more and more media devices (including laptops and tables) supporting USB-C, the biggest issue (as I currently see it) is finding a USB-C to HDMI adaptor/dongle that supports bit-streaming 'lossless' audio formats...

 

[mandrix]

Maybe (probably) it's just me, but it's a lot of fun to build a HTPC. The AMD Ryzen 5600G is a fantastic HTPC chip and on a motherboard with a HDMI 2.0 port it will output 24/192 surround audio, 4k video with HDR, and can transcode pretty decently as well. I paired mine with an ASRock mini-ITX motherboard (Fatal1ty B450 GAMING-ITX/AC AM4 - no longer being made but the B550 version is easy to get for $130). Throw in 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD and you have a really capable machine. Using a Noctua low-profile cooler with the low-noise adapter which keeps the PC nearly silent, and a Corsair 430W SFX power supply which stays entirely passive (silent) at the power draw of this system. I'm using a single "be quiet!" 80mm fan as an exhaust, not even sure I need it but I can't hear it. This all fits in a Silverstone ML05B case which fits and looks perfect in an AV rack. A Logitech K400 keyboard/mouse handles input.

Why do all of this? Well, it's kind of fun. But also, instead of reusing an old laptop which will kind of chug at times, I have something which fits seamlessly into my rack, and will laugh at any A/V task I throw at it (I could in theory do some gaming on it too, but haven't). And it wasn't that expensive - even using some more expensive parts like the Noctua cooler and Corsair power supply, it ran about $600. It runs Windows 11 perfectly and will play pretty much literally any audio or video format. I have a NAS on the other side of my house with 16 TB of storage, and with a gigabit network connection it's never had a problem. Picture from when I was building it, I've included a link above if you want to see the case from the front.

View attachment 89666

Dude! You're my kinda guy!
Although I no longer have an HTPC, what I have now is a combined main pc/audio pc/ surround archive pc/ all purpose rig. I also have a secondary pc that also serves archive purposes for BD's.
This pc serves as the main source of playback for all my audio in my combined pc/audio room, to run an Atmos 7.1.4 system.

The HDMI out from motherboard, the HDMI out from the graphics card, and the HDMI out from my second pc are all run through an HDMI switch that is controlled by a remote and is fed to the AVR.

If you look at my avatar, you can see me leaning on my main pc. It's 42" tall, including the base on castors.

It's a Case Labs Merlin with two pedestals, one on top and one on the bottom.

The bottom pedestal has a 480mm radiator and triple heatkiller waterpumps with 1/2" copper tubing plumbing.

The top pedestal has a full length mount that provides mounting for three HDD cages that each hold 4 HDD's with fans.
These hold dual copies of my ripped surround collection, in .iso format (except for DTS-CD) but only one copy of BD's, the second copy of which is kept on HDD's stored elsewhere.

The main case has a 240mm radiator in front and the fans provide the intake air for internal cooling. Both radiators have Gentle Typhoon AP-15 fans in push/pull going strong for over 10 years.
There is also a dual D5 clear acrylic Bitspower pump block in the main case. (I used to have dual water cooled graphics cards, why I have overkill for water pumps)
All of the "topside" water tubing in the main case is clear acrylic tubing.

The current motherboard is an Asus Prime Z590-A with a 11700K cpu cooled by an EK Quantum Velocity water block.

All pumps and fans are controlled by two Aquacomputer Aquaero controllers; the electronics are watercooled by tiny copper waterblocks made for that purpose.
I also have a Lamptron FC8 controller leftover from various led light controlling duties.

The case is all aluminum and powder coated white from the factory (no longer in business, sadly, a victim of the aluminum tariffs)

The power supply is a new Seasonic platinum 1000W. All wiring on the rig was made up by me, including crimping the terminals, and all the psu wiring was sleeved by myself.
I just rewired/resleeved the 24 pin cable in red, white, and blue for a patriotic theme.

The base of the main case has a dual layer acrylic panel with edge polishing and circled by led's to form a "light panel" that I first installed circa 10 years ago.

Currently graphics are handled by either the Nvidia 3060 card or the cpu graphics. I normally use the cpu graphics/HDMI out from motherboard > AVR for sound playback mostly to PowerDVD or VLC.

All radiator fans have filters, as my carpet seems to absorb, then emit dust en masse.

Forgot to add, 32GB of DRAM, and a 1GB Nvram SSD and 3 SSD's round out the storage with the 11 HDD's.

 

[Sonik Wiz]

Dude! You're my kinda guy!
Although I no longer have an HTPC, what I have now is a combined main pc/audio pc/ surround archive pc/ all purpose rig. I also have a secondary pc that also serves archive purposes for BD's.
This pc serves as the main source of playback for all my audio in my combined pc/audio room, to run an Atmos 7.1.4 system.

The HDMI out from motherboard, the HDMI out from the graphics card, and the HDMI out from my second pc are all run through an HDMI switch that is controlled by a remote and is fed to the AVR.

If you look at my avatar, you can see me leaning on my main pc. It's 42" tall, including the base on castors.

It's a Case Labs Merlin with two pedestals, one on top and one on the bottom.

The bottom pedestal has a 480mm radiator and triple heatkiller waterpumps with 1/2" copper tubing plumbing.

The top pedestal has a full length mount that provides mounting for three HDD cages that each hold 4 HDD's with fans.
These hold dual copies of my ripped surround collection, in .iso format (except for DTS-CD) but only one copy of BD's, the second copy of which is kept on HDD's stored elsewhere.

The main case has a 240mm radiator in front and the fans provide the intake air for internal cooling. Both radiators have Gentle Typhoon AP-15 fans in push/pull going strong for over 10 years.
There is also a dual D5 clear acrylic Bitspower pump block in the main case. (I used to have dual water cooled graphics cards, why I have overkill for water pumps)
All of the "topside" water tubing in the main case is clear acrylic tubing.

The current motherboard is an Asus Prime Z590-A with a 11700K cpu cooled by an EK Quantum Velocity water block.

All pumps and fans are controlled by two Aquacomputer Aquaero controllers; the electronics are watercooled by tiny copper waterblocks made for that purpose.
I also have a Lamptron FC8 controller leftover from various led light controlling duties.

The case is all aluminum and powder coated white from the factory (no longer in business, sadly, a victim of the aluminum tariffs)

The power supply is a new Seasonic platinum 1000W. All wiring on the rig was made up by me, including crimping the terminals, and all the psu wiring was sleeved by myself.
I just rewired/resleeved the 24 pin cable in red, white, and blue for a patriotic theme.

The base of the main case has a dual layer acrylic panel with edge polishing and circled by led's to form a "light panel" that I first installed circa 10 years ago.

Currently graphics are handled by either the Nvidia 3060 card or the cpu graphics. I normally use the cpu graphics/HDMI out from motherboard > AVR for sound playback mostly to PowerDVD or VLC.

All radiator fans have filters, as my carpet seems to absorb, then emit dust en masse.

Forgot to add, 32GB of DRAM, and a 1GB Nvram SSD and 3 SSD's round out the storage with the 11 HDD's.

View attachment 89675

Good Lord Boondocks! That is both Beauty and the Beast!!
As I said I would never do a build with side windows but I admire those that do. If you have some internal pics to share I'd love to see 'em.

With all those HDD's may ask what configuration you have them in? And how backed up?

 

[mandrix]

Wiz I just have duplicate folders on different drives. It's not a NAS setup. e.g. I have all DVDA in one folder on one drive, backed up by dupes on a folder on a different drive, etc. The only exception is Surround BD's, I keep one copy on the machine, one copy on the the second machine until a drive fills (usually a small drive such as 2-8TB) then I remove it and put it in a cushioned box such as it was delivered in an put it on the shelf with other archive drives.
I DO breakout some things such as Atmos and Auro3D separately, as well as flac downloads and the few flac rips I do, etc. In general I don't rip much music, preferring to play .iso format when possible or in the case of Tidal d/l or purchased Atmos files like MP4 or M4A I have my categories for them. No playlists.

Only thing I have handy in pics is the new 24 pin cable I recently sleeved:

 

[ubertrout]

Dude! You're my kinda guy!
Although I no longer have an HTPC, what I have now is a combined main pc/audio pc/ surround archive pc/ all purpose rig. I also have a secondary pc that also serves archive purposes for BD's.
This pc serves as the main source of playback for all my audio in my combined pc/audio room, to run an Atmos 7.1.4 system.

The HDMI out from motherboard, the HDMI out from the graphics card, and the HDMI out from my second pc are all run through an HDMI switch that is controlled by a remote and is fed to the AVR.

If you look at my avatar, you can see me leaning on my main pc. It's 42" tall, including the base on castors.

It's a Case Labs Merlin with two pedestals, one on top and one on the bottom.

The bottom pedestal has a 480mm radiator and triple heatkiller waterpumps with 1/2" copper tubing plumbing.

The top pedestal has a full length mount that provides mounting for three HDD cages that each hold 4 HDD's with fans.
These hold dual copies of my ripped surround collection, in .iso format (except for DTS-CD) but only one copy of BD's, the second copy of which is kept on HDD's stored elsewhere.

The main case has a 240mm radiator in front and the fans provide the intake air for internal cooling. Both radiators have Gentle Typhoon AP-15 fans in push/pull going strong for over 10 years.
There is also a dual D5 clear acrylic Bitspower pump block in the main case. (I used to have dual water cooled graphics cards, why I have overkill for water pumps)
All of the "topside" water tubing in the main case is clear acrylic tubing.

The current motherboard is an Asus Prime Z590-A with a 11700K cpu cooled by an EK Quantum Velocity water block.

All pumps and fans are controlled by two Aquacomputer Aquaero controllers; the electronics are watercooled by tiny copper waterblocks made for that purpose.
I also have a Lamptron FC8 controller leftover from various led light controlling duties.

The case is all aluminum and powder coated white from the factory (no longer in business, sadly, a victim of the aluminum tariffs)

The power supply is a new Seasonic platinum 1000W. All wiring on the rig was made up by me, including crimping the terminals, and all the psu wiring was sleeved by myself.
I just rewired/resleeved the 24 pin cable in red, white, and blue for a patriotic theme.

The base of the main case has a dual layer acrylic panel with edge polishing and circled by led's to form a "light panel" that I first installed circa 10 years ago.

Currently graphics are handled by either the Nvidia 3060 card or the cpu graphics. I normally use the cpu graphics/HDMI out from motherboard > AVR for sound playback mostly to PowerDVD or VLC.

All radiator fans have filters, as my carpet seems to absorb, then emit dust en masse.

Forgot to add, 32GB of DRAM, and a 1GB Nvram SSD and 3 SSD's round out the storage with the 11 HDD's.

View attachment 89675

Wow. That is gorgeous. Not what I was going for but a real accomplishment.

 

[HomerJAU]

Now days multichannel audio and hires video (including 4K) can be decoded and played with pretty low end/cost Intel processors, there is no need for high end processors (i7 i5 or separate graphics cards or lots of RAM, 2GB is enough). Why use a noisey PC requiring multiple fans and $$$ when you could use a fan less (silent) device (without Windows).

 

[ubertrout]

Now days multichannel audio and hires video (including 4K) can be decoded and played with pretty low end/cost Intel processors, there is no need for high end processors (i7 i5 or separate graphics cards or lots of RAM, 2GB is enough). Why use a noisey PC requiring multiple fans and $$$ when you could use a fan less (silent) device (without Windows).

I like being able to do all PC things on my setup, which is both audio and video. I actually started my build with a Athlon 3000G processor before the 5600G prices dropped and it was choking on 4k HDR video (although everything else was fine).

On the other hand, I compared my CPU to what @boondocks is using, and the performance difference isn't huge - about 15% in single core: UserBenchmark: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G vs Intel Core i7-11700K. However, I'm not using it to control a large number of drives and have half the RAM (although even my 16GB is probably overkill).

 

[HomerJAU]

I actually started my build with a Athlon 3000G processor before the 5600G prices dropped and it was choking on 4k HDR video (although everything else was fine).

More recent CPUs decode HEVC (H265 4K video encoding) in the chip (very fast). Older CPUs would do the decoding via software (very slow). HEVC decoding in Intel CPUs has been around since late 2015. AMD probably around same time.

 

[ubertrout]

More recent CPUs decode HEVC (H265 4K video encoding) in the chip (very fast). Older CPUs would do the decoding via software (very slow). HEVC decoding in Intel CPUs has been around since late 2015. AMD probably around same time.

Although it did fine with a SDR 4k file, on a 4k file with HDR the graphics subsystem was completely saturated (I was logging the whole thing) and the video was stuttering using the Athlon 3000G. Switching to the much more powerful Ryzen 5600G fixed the problem.

 

[mandrix]

Now days multichannel audio and hires video (including 4K) can be decoded and played with pretty low end/cost Intel processors, there is no need for high end processors (i7 i5 or separate graphics cards or lots of RAM, 2GB is enough). Why use a noisey PC requiring multiple fans and $$$ when you could use a fan less (silent) device (without Windows).

1) I bought a gpu with 12 GB of VRAM not for decoding/playback but for AI stems and (see below). Otherwise the Intel cpu graphics work fine for audio, agreed.
2) I don't have a noisy pc. My fans are Nidec AP-15's and my cpu is water cooled.
3) I have an i7 cpu and 32GB of DRAM AND the GPU because I also do graphics work in Photoshop.
4) I like having a performance machine to do all sorts of things, not limited to playback of music.
5) I am a performance enthusiast, have been for many years. I used to buy motherboards and cpu's, delid the cpu's and remove the factory TIM and replace it with better and overclock the snot out of them, then sell the mobo/cpu as a unit for a profit. I have a rep on overclock.net going back a decade as a seller.

I have a truly multipurpose machine. That it also takes the place of a disc player (excepting DVDA graphics) and plays virtually anything is good enough for me. That my audio room is also my pc room with two pc's connected via an HDMI switch is a bonus. That I'm happy having a custom built pc, built by myself, with all custom wiring made by me and sleeved by myself, one of my passions for well over a decade, is fine with me.

I hear criticisms all time about using a pc, my pc as it is set up, as my music player. People don't like this, they don't like that. Overkill, doing it wrong, should do this or that. Must be loud. All that money. Who cares? Not my concern. All I can say is it suits me just damn fine. At 73 I may not know it all, but I damn well know what I like.

 

[HomerJAU]

I hear criticisms all time about using a pc,

I’m not being critical of your setup. I was just pointing out to those who read this thread titled: “PC for Multichannel Playback - What’s your setup?” - someone new to using a PC for playback does not have to invest in all the bells and whistles for playback.

 

[mandrix]

I’m not being critical of your setup. I was just pointing out to those who read this thread titled: “PC for Multichannel Playback - What’s your setup?” - someone new to using a PC for playback does not have to invest in all the bells and whistles for playback.

I know your not. I'm addressing the larger area of things I hear on the forum. Just seemed like a good time to whip it out. lol. I don't get mad about it, I just get tired of being told what others think is the best thing to do.
Of course the minimal setup for music playback only would be far less than what I have.

 

[mandrix]

Before I shut up let me add that my HTPC was a mini-itx mobo with an i3 cpu and a tiny gpu with an HDMI port to bitstream sound with. It served me quite well for years before I decided to roll up all my pc needs into one big box.. One does not need a lot of power for a good music machine at all, and a modern cpu has great graphic capabilities as well!

 

[mandrix]

@anibal I asked one of the vendors on Amazon about his USB C to HDMI cable and he said depending on the device it would permit uncompressed 5.1, 7.1, or stereo audio, is exactly how he phrased it.
FWIW.

 

[SeeMoreDigital]

@anibal I asked one of the vendors on Amazon about his USB C to HDMI cable and he said depending on the device it would permit uncompressed 5.1, 7.1, or stereo audio, is exactly how he phrased it.
FWIW.

This is my understanding too with multi-channel lossless LPCM in .wav and maybe FLAC. Although it would be handy to know the exact models that are able to offer this.

Unfortunately there's still the issue that the current crop of USB-C to HDMI adaptors don't support lossless 'bit-streamed' audio formats, such as: Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA...

 

[mandrix]

This is my understanding too with multi-channel lossless LPCM in .wav and maybe FLAC. Although it would be handy to know the exact models that are able to offer this.

Unfortunately there's still the issue that the current crop of USB-C to HDMI adaptors don't support lossless 'bit-streamed' audio formats, such as: Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA...

Yes. Well the thing I do is ask questions. Most vendors on Amazon will give you an answer within a day or so. Whether or not you get a coherent answer is another thing. But usually there are enough selling similar products you can move on to a different one if you don't get any satisfaction from a particular one. With uh, "made overseas" electronic products I generally buy a warranty plan as well as I've been shafted before on stuff crapping out after a few months use.
(not necessarily for a cable, I mean, but anything I spend $50 or more on)