I realize there are alot of folks who believe that all that is necessary for proper digital playback is 1s & 0s. Use any old CD/DVD player with a digital out, send it to a good DAC and you're done. Look, I can't explain why or how but it certainly does matter. When I still used CDs I had discovered that a mid-90s Harman Kardon player yielded better sound when driving my budget DAC than when driving it with any other player I owned. Nowadays my digital music is 100% computer based. I used an old IBM/Lenovo PC that I bought off Craigslist for $65 and with the use of the free Vortexbox software and a 3TB drive, turned it into a music server/NAS. After several failed attemps at getting good sound out of a PC, I had decided that a server driving something else was the clear way to get high-end audio from a PC. That something ended up being the now defunct, Squeezebox. This setup worked and worked well but of course like everything in audio, that led to another path of upgrades. When the Squeezeboxes were no longer available, their value increased on eBay and eventually I sold both of my Touches for twice what I paid for them. Since then I've been searching for the next solution.
First came the Pogoplug. Or better stated the VAMP, which is a linux hacked Pogoplug. You can find details of this on Vortexbox.org This solution was dirt cheap and sounds just fine. Of course us audiophiles are never happy with just fine. So thus begins the quest for the best sound possible. Until proven different, my Vortexbox from here on out referred to as NAS is staying in place. So what should be on the other end? Another little box like a Squeezebox or a full PC? I'll cover a few of the things I've tried here.
Since my Pogoplug was already hacked with bootloader I decided to try another software solution on it. Lately the forums are abuzz with glory for the BeagleBone Black (BBB) and the Raspberry Pi. They are similar in cost as in both are under $50 for the bare board but the BBB has a faster processor and the Ethernet is separate from the USB controller so I believe it's the better solution. Anyhow both of these devices are capable of running a program in Linux Debian Wheezy called MPD or Music Player Daemon. A few quick internet searches revealed that my old Pogoplug is also capable of running this software. While it is said that running this on a BBB is a piece of cake it was far from that on the Pogoplug (PP). I was unable to just put Wheezy on the PP so I needed to put an older release on it and then upgrade it to Squeeze. Then upgrade squeeze to Wheezy. All of this is done thru a command line on another PC via a program called Putty. After all of that came the actual installation of MPD. From this point, I followed the instructions listed on Computer Audiophile for the BBB. The only issue I had took me 3 days to figure out. MPD is 100% command line based and getting it to "talk" to the NAS is not point and click. It expects your music files to be in a certain directory but obviously you cannot copy terrabytes worth of data to the PP. So you must mount the NAS to a location that MPD understands. With the help of my wife and some folks at Computer Audiophile, we got it figured out. So how does it sound? Better than my desktop Lenovo Core i3 running Windows 7-64bit. Better than my Netbook running Win7-32 that is purposefully streamlined with no extra process and running Fidelizer 4.0 While I'd still like to try the BBB because it has a much faster processor than the PP, most could be perfectly happy with the sound of the PP running MPD. This is certainly a cheap solution that sounds fantastic and is much less fuss than getting Windows to sound as good. The downside is that it requires a NAS and an Ipad/Ipod to control it. MPD as a music playback software is not bad but not nearly IMHO as easy or pretty as Jremote for J River Music Player (JRMC). In a perfect world, the PP or BBB could accept commands from Jremote and have the capabilities of JRMC when accessed from a PC. So far the PP with MPD is the best sound I've produced to date, but I'm not giving up on using JRMC yet.
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