Hi
Articles and questions around audiophile quality computer audio are more and more common, but I’ve seen little which either suited my needs, or was put together from an audiophile perspective – so I went and built my own system. This has been both enjoyable to do, and also sounds pretty good, so I thought it worth sharing across the forum – I welcome comments and suggestions from anyone (anyone who can read the overlong posting below, that is...

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THE BACKGROUND – I was using an old (and noisy) PC to rip vinyl and replay CD’s, and love the convenience of having thousands of hours of tracks at my fingertips – casual listening to vinyl without wearing out my stylus is also a significant plus
Vinyl is transferred from preamp RCA outputs to a studio interface (Native instruments Audio Kontrol~£200), at 24/96, then thru USB to the PC, where it is recorded and split using CuBase. CD’s are ripped using EAC
Files are stored on external USB drives, and replayed via the PC using Media Monkey and Foobar, back to the native instruments interface via USB, then into the preamp
It actually sounded OK – ripped CD’s maybe a little below my Naim CDX without it’s XPS PSU, with ripped vinyl sounding better still
But I felt that a cheaply cobbled together selection of bits was unlikely to be giving me the best sound, so started researching the options


THE RATIONALE – I knew I wanted to get a separate ADC and DAC, with their own dedicated power supplies (rather than be powered via USB)
I also wanted to reduce connections and devices, making things as “pure” as possible for any data transfer, so removal of external storage drives and removal of interface cards within the PC were key
The PC itself needed to be as quiet as possible, as it needed to be in the listening room. I also wanted it to be built from parts which, if not inherently audiophile themselves, were at least chosen with audiophile mentality in mind
No-one I found had anything like the above – so I had no real option other than to build it myself – not an easy decision, as I’d never done anything remotely like build a PC before


THE PARTS SELECTION – this took quite a while and a lot of research, including selecting suppliers for the chosen parts
ADC/DAC/Master clock – not yet purchased (that’s stage 2....) but current pole position is the Mytek Stereo96 range – about £800 per box, and studio gear rather than HI-FI
PC – breaks down into a set of component parts:
 
Case: Fractal R2 – I wanted something black and plain (kinda hi-fi looking) and which was based around being quiet – this was spot-on...lots of bitumen soundproofing, special vibration mounts for the drives...)
Motherboard: Gigabyte P55M-UD2 – a must for me was S/PDIF i/o (for the MYTEK units), which this had. I specifically wanted these as “headers” on the motherboard, so I could connect the S/PDIF cable direct, rather than going thru a crappy female connector on the motherboard backplane, or an expansion card, connected with who knows what – the thinking here was to avoid, as far as possible, any variations in cable type and to reduce the number of connections between external DAC and motherboard, preserving the integrity of the digital signal
PSU: I got all hi-fi over this, and overspecced the voltage needed (at least for the complexity of the machine) and got a Nesteq X-Zero 500W – as I don’t drive the machine hard, no real point going over 500w. This has a nice external fan control knob, including the ability to permanently set as “off”, as well as sensing to turn on if it all gets a little toasty. From a hi-fi perspective, this cost £120, which is peanuts for an audiophile (the sale of my 2002 Naim XPS PSU financed the entire computer!) but seems to be considered way OTT for computers
Chipset: Intel i5 750 – wanted to future proof myself with an i5 or higher, but not so much that temperature ran high – this is significantly cooler than an i7, so recommended itself)
CPU cooler: Wanting this to be as quiet as possible, I found a fanless cooler (Prolima Megahalems MEGASHADOW), effectively just a huge heatsink, which fitted into the case with a few mm to spare – in other words, zero noise.
Graphics card; as above, fanless. I used MSI N210-MD512H from (quiet PC – great company!)
Storage: 320gb as a system drive, and 2 x 1tb drives – all Samsung spinpoint, which seemed to be considered the quietest around
OS: Windows 7
Cost for the PC components was ~£850 – which I think is pretty damn good for a bespoke quad-core machine with 2.3tb of storage


THE BUILD – I was sure I was going to set the village on fire, but instead it all went well, and took about 4 hours, which I could easily halve if I did it again. I also really enjoyed it!
What was definitely worthwhile was the hours of research, making sure that parts were compatible and suitable, which I am convinced was a major contributor to things working first-time


THE RESULT – Well...it looks very pretty, in a monolithic kinda way. The good news is that is almost silent, with just a couple of 120mm case fans running at a slow RPM (and fan defeated on PSU) – I am considering getting an add-on fan controller to step the RPM (and noise) down even further, but it’s so quiet I am not sure I even need to bother
Monitoring the temperature of the 4 cores, they are well within tolerance, with a general average of 35 degrees when playing music - and only a couple of degrees higher when running BBC iPlayer or DVD
Running the same external DAC the sound is better – honest. I can think of 2 possibilities here:
1) the files are now on internal drives, connected with hi-speed SATA cables direct to the motherboard, and are not running thru additional USB cables to external storage
2) The more powerful CPU is working less to reconstitute the compressed FLAC files
Advances in the motherboard construction and layout might also be a factor?
Probably the biggest result is the self-satisfaction of building something bespoke


THE FUTURE – I need to complete the picture with the external ADC & DAC, the timing of which is dependent on how much contract work I get (or how impatient I am), but I expect that this final stage will recognise the full benefits of a bespoke PC

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If you made it this far, then I guess the above was of some interest. I’d be interested to hear from anyone else who has embarked on a similar self-build, and am happy to share thoughts /advice with anyone who is contemplating it
Cheers
Simon