Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions HTPC and Music Quality

After using a cheap Onkyo CD player (~$200) for several months in my home theater, I have discovered the joys of a home theater PC. With the ability to neatly organize and instantly access my entire music collection, I don't think I can ever go back to using a simple CD player.

Here is my question to all of you great, knowledgeable people...does anyone have experience to share concerning the quality of music from an HTPC vs a dedicated CD player?

I had my CD player connected to my AVR (Denon AVR-1910) via coaxial digital audio cable and I now have my HTPC connected to the AVR via HDMI. If my understanding is correct, then both of these setups should be exactly the same...by using the digital audio connection, I am bypassing the onboard DAC's of both the CD player and the PC and using the DAC that is in my AVR, correct? The source of the data (CD player or PC) should not matter since they are just passing along the 1's and 0's to the AVR for processing.

Does anyone know if any software on the PC tampers with the digital data (any post-processing)? In other words, is the ripped file (assuming it is lossless and not compressed in any way) output from the computer in exactly the same form as if it was read directly from the CD? I'm using Windows 7 x64 and organizing/playing music through Windows Media Center.

Having said that, the sound coming from the HTPC sounds amazing...I have not yet done a direct compairison of HTPC to CD, but I plan on doing that this weekend. Almost all of my music collection is stored on the PC as WMA Lossless files (thank goodness for terabyte hard drives )

I think I'm going to sell my Onkyo CD player and I just wanted some opinions/suggestions as to whether or not this would be a good idea. Is there anytime a CD player could be superior to a HTPC, or will there be no difference at all?

Thanks to everyone for your time and opinions!

It is nearly impossible to get a bit-for-bit transfer from Windows 7 for audio. It's mixer combines the output of each running program together, and resamples it all to a fixed frequency (usaully 48 kHz, but that can be changed in the control panel, you may want to bump it to 96 or 192 kHz).

That said, with the volume control set to 100% it does a very good job of preserving quality, it just isn't the identical information you'd get from a stand-alone CD player streaming the bits from the surface of a disc.

Luckily our ears are not quite that picky and it still sounds identical to most of us

I thought with Vista (Win7 release 1) microsoft pulled audio out of the os kernel and you could bypass the mixer? People made a big deal over this when Vista was first released.

It figures that I can't get bit-for-bit accuracy...that would be too much to ask for! I think that I am willing to sacrifice a little sound quality for the convenience of using a HTPC, though. Still sounds darn good to my ears...

By the way and completely off topic...I'm still very new to this whole forum thing. How are you able to "cut" a snippet from a reply and "paste" it into a new reply? Just curious...I've seen this done a lot and have no idea how to do it! Thanks!

You can press the "Quote" button on the bottom of the post you're trying to use, then edit it in the quick reply. Or you can switch to full reply screen and do the same.

With a new iCore i3 or i5, and the proper software you can bitstream movies with Windows 7, as far as music goes from within WMC, I'm not sure. but I can tell you its not far off, if not there yet. The windows audio masher is not in control anymore. there is an audio processor on the chip, a video processor too

I think you've misunderstood something you've read. Intel's CPUs do no have video nor audio processing. They may be fast enough to decode H.264 without an external processor (but I'd still prefer to use the one in the video card), but there's nothing dedicated on the CPU (actually there's nothing dedicated on the GPU either, but I like to off-load what ever processing I can).

Windows 7 still has the software mixer. It's obvious when you can control the volume of each individual program that's producing sound. There was a stink from a very vocal minority, they were quickly forgotten. Though there was a consolation, an API was provided for programs who want to bitstream, but they have to be specifically written to do so. If they just open the Windows audio device and start playing sound, they'll get the new mixer.

OK, that fits with my understanding, though I did not think through the implications. You can bypass the mixer, but most apps don't.

I wonder if there are any open source players in development that will do this?

Sorry I think you've misunderstood something you haven't read

I have the iCore 5 650, Windows 7, TMT3, and all the required ingredientss.

The new intel iCore 3 & 5 do have the GPU and audio processing on the CPU. (iCore 7 no) They came out beginning of the year. And with the proper playback software you can by pass the windows mixer and bitstream to your AVR processor. For BluRay, TMT3, WinDVD 2010, and others, for Music, FDDSHow and other software (ithink, on the music part)

The iCore CPUs were buildt just for HTPCs and can process any current HD video file format you can throw at it easily with the proper software setup correctly

You mean Core i3 and i5. Since we're going around correcting each other.

I stand corrected.

I asked about "Bitstreaming Music thru the Windows Media Center interface over on the Core "i" thread over at AVS. and the below is the responses I got, in the first few minutes.


Originally Posted by wordgasm
Can you "bitstream" music (bypass the windows mixer) with the icore? If so what software do you need, I'm running wma lossless

Thanks

Jeff

You need to use a WASAPI renderer to bypass the mixer.
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Missing Remote


Today, 11:18 AM #2224 | Link
wordgasm
Advanced Member


Join Date: May 2004
Location: Blue Ridge Foothills, NC
Posts: 675 Quote:
Originally Posted by babgvant
You need to use a WASAPI renderer to bypass the mixer.

SOrry I've been focusing all my time on bitstreaming BluRay lately and haven't researched the music side. Will a WASAPI play thru the Media Center interface (WMP). Did a quick google on WASAPI renderer and don't see anything about it with WMC

Thanks

Jeff


Today, 11:20 AM #2225 | Link
babgvant
Senior Member


Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Chicago, IL
Posts: 228 Quote:
Originally Posted by wordgasm
SOrry I've been focusing all my time on bitstreaming BluRay lately and haven't researched the music side. Will a WASAPI play thru the Media Center interface (WMP). Did a quick google on WASAPI renderer and don't see anything about it with WMC

Thanks

Jeff

You can use Reclock and the MPC-HC audio renderers with WMC, but Reclock breaks live TV and the last time I used the MPC-HC renderer it was pretty beta.__________________

Originally Posted by babgvant
You can use Reclock and the MPC-HC audio renderers with WMC, but Reclock breaks live TV and the last time I used the MPC-HC renderer it was pretty beta.

I should add that it's been a few months since I looked at the MPC-HC renderer. It could be much better now.

It's a shame that MC doesn't ship with an optional WASAPI renderer.
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Missing Remote

Hmm... thinking on this, if windows captures and remixes all audio, even from the most recent AMD graphics cards, would'nt that break HDCP?

This is exactly why I gave up on my HTPC. Its a full time job keeping up on what isn't working and how.

HTPCs are getting much closer to not being such a pain. I've been playing with them for years. For me sticking with mainstream software and hardware, and not using everything trick in the book (trying to customize every interface, menu, leading edge software, drivers, codecs, renderers, etc.) makes mine much more reliable. I just rdp in about once a month and update my video drivers and anydvd. Most of the time these days it just works for music, Bluray with bitstreaming and OTA TV.

For Bluray you can bypass the windows mixer with commercial software players. For TV and music, thru WMC, then die hard ones are figuring it out as we speak, and I'll jump on board when they have it all worked out and reliable. With that said, TV and Music, thru the mixer sounds incredible for me. So I'm in no hurry, but will like it when it's available.

Audio thru the mixer (or not thru the mixer) does not break HDCP.

The core "i", bitstream, some ATI cards and the Xonar Audio card (with HDMI pass thru on the card) I have one of these Xonars available I moved on to Core i

OK, I did some reading on Anandtech and it looks like AMD is still not bitstreaming with their current gen on board graphics. The 890GX release looks to be a maintenance release as a bridge to their APU solution. It looks like that is going to happen in 2011 and it will be based on the current 5x series gpu.

Looks like Intel has made big gains with the i5 chip. The actually get similar performance to ATI's current onboard solution, which is a huge leap in performance from a year ago.

I'm thinking that the AMD 5x cards must do proper bitstreaming.