Solved Desktop DAC/AMP with build-in PEQ

His wife did not approve and that was his downfall. She wanted to settle down and he wanted to make it big. That means touring.

It was hard to keep up with a trust fund kid. He had much nicer toys than me. I built my first SCSI rigs for him.

He got his son hooked on drugs and killed himself in guilt. Such a pathetic ending to a gifted persons life.
 
Being a touring musician can be a very hard life. I read this a couple of days ago.

www.musicradar.com

“The music industry is a profoundly dangerous place”: New report reveals the shockingly high suicide level within the music industry

Poor financial return, lack of mental health support and the stresses of touring are all cited as key reasons that lay behind the alarming stats
www.musicradar.com www.musicradar.com

Well, this is a bit of a sad subject.

I love audio, electronics and programming. I guess I got into audio and electronics even before I got into computers. It was great to hear of someone using something like freebsd as a source with some nice quality headphones, I wasn't aware of that Fiio dac box, very interesting. It makes me wonder what it would sound like through a good amp and speakers.
 
I still think USB is a bit of a crap engineering solution though, compared to putting the dac directly on the system bus. All the latency, buffering, re-clocking, etc. It makes me think there must be a market for motherboards with high quality DACs and audio output stages. I guess that was what companies like ESS were chasing with some of the better quality motherboards out there, which is probably where this thread started off. I've been very surprised at how good the sound I get out of my little mini pc with realtek pci dac is. Someone has done a lot of work to get this kind of audio quality out of a low-end consumer device like this, especially a PC motherboard; it's a lot better than it used to be. Perhaps some of the work done on audio in mobiles which is a huge mass market has been making it's way into PC's.
 
Hahaha, those amps are made in England, that company is run by a famous engineer called Peter Qvortrup. I've got an early one of his amplifiers from before he set up Audio Note, that was under a different brand label called 'audio innovations', but made by the same team. There's no silver wire in my output transformers though haha. It still sounds very sweet. And you need a pair of these english speakers (made in northhampton!) to go with that amp https://www.lowtherloudspeakers.com/lowther-acousta-117-gb

Trust me, this stuff sounds nice! We still make some good gear in the UK, amazingly :)
 
Still, I'd really like to have a listen to your freebsd, focal and fiio setup! Guess I'll have to save my pennies :)
Which motherboard are you using, out of interest?
 
blackbird9 said:
Still, I'd really like to have a listen to your freebsd, focal and fiio setup! Guess I'll have to save my pennies :)
Which motherboard are you using, out of interest?
Click to expand...
I am using an Aorus X670E Xtreme motherboard.
Focal is great, but I would like to listen to the Audeze LCD-5 in the near future, eventually.
If you do not need parametric equalization in every audio application, then I would recommend you the FiiO K9 Pro ESS, it would be my first choice if it would not be the PEQ on the hardware level.
 
That mobo is at the other end of the scale from my N100 mini pc, it looks pretty good. I'm surprised you were getting noise from the on-board dac, but perhaps the amp they used didn't like driving the focals.
 
It is OK, more or less, because it has instability issues with RAM clocked over 4800MHz, and CPUs newer than Zen4.
With Zen4 there was not a single problem, but Zen4 tends to get quite hot, due to manufacturing issues.
At launch of Zen5, and the first updates for Zen5 on this board were horrible, the board crashed, and I had to reset CMOS very often.

If anything board related, I would recommend MSI, they never got me down.
 
Shame, that doesn't sound so great. Gigabyte used to be good, but I think they rush them out nowadays. Yes I've had a couple of MSI boards, never had any problems with MSI.
 
blackbird9 said:
Shame, that doesn't sound so great. Gigabyte used to be good, but I think they rush them out nowadays. Yes I've had a couple of MSI boards, never had any problems with MSI.
Click to expand...
I would have bought an MSI back then, but I needed to upgrade from an RTX 3090 to a RTX 4090, because the RTX 3090 got very hot by just running my 4K display at 144 Hz.

Another question, you said you have a mini PC with a DAC/AMP.
Do you use also FreeBSD + OSS for listening to audio ?
I have the feeling with my headphones that the sound device closes an reopens sometimes much to fast resulting in a pop-in, during music playback when there is a short break between one and the next instrument.
I do not want to believe it, but since it does only happen on some of my tracks, can it be due to bad recording ?
 
Only an external headphone amp, not an external dac, I use the onboard dac. On this box I'm taking the audio output from the headphone socket and piping that into the headphone amp, since they don't provide a line out. It's essentially equivalent to a laptop. Yes using freebsd, I just use the standard snd_hda driver, haven't had any problems. I've got "snd_driver_load="YES" in /boot/loader.conf. Maybe I've been lucky with this mobo though, I noticed there are some threads where people have had to set device hints to get things to work, like here https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/no-sound-hdmi-into-beelink-mini-s12.96404/
Thinking about it, I haven't tried the sound over hdmi that guy is talking about, I just use the headphones, and I don't know if mic in works, there's no mic input on this box either. So maybe not everything is working here, I only really care about the headphone out working. It's a shame there's no line-out, but it's a very cheap little box.

Hard to believe the data being played would crash the sound device. If it's happening there might be a clue in the kernel logs, check your /var/log/messages to see if the driver is being unloaded and reloaded. Seems unlikely, but you never know, I guess, it could be some kind of data-driven error.
 
I also got sound working the same way on thinkpad, I've got an X201. For a while I had that set up with bitperfect on and was using it as a source for my stereo, piping the headphone out from the thinkpad into the stereo amp. Of course old thinkpads tend to have good compatibility with freebsd. I think that laptop has another realtek codec in it, I can't remember which one off the top of my head. The mini pc has a realtek chip, not an ESS like your gigabyte mobo. If anything the ESS chip should be quite a lot better, it has higher specs in the datasheet than the realtek chip. Of course it all depends on how they have designed the audio circuitry around the onboard dac. I would be surprised if a premium motherboard like yours had bad audio hardware, but I guess its possible. I was more expecting this cheap little mini pc from aliexpress I have here to have crap audio, I was surprised when it gave me good sound quality. It's a generic shenzhen motherboard, it's not a NUC or anything like that. So maybe I just got lucky with this box.
 
Yeah, I'm kind of surprised you've been getting bad results from your onboard dac. But you said some things about the board being unstable... maybe it's just not a great board. Although it works ok with the USB dac! Sometimes it's just not worth spending a lot of time debugging software, it's quicker and cheaper just to find some hardware that works. Your fiio dac should be giving you better results than the onboard chip anyway, personally I would just stick with that now :)
 
Just a thought, if you want a dedicated machine just for playing music, why not give an old thinkpad a try, you can pick them up for peanuts nowadays, and they are nice machines. I would suggest an X200/201/220/230. You get everything built-in, screen and keyboard, and good freebsd compatibility. The hardware is top quality, when it was new it was like a $1500-$2000 laptop, and they are built to last for many years. I had nice results using my X201 as a source for my hifi, it worked with the bitperfect switched on, running freebsd. That was using the built-in dac. I had it sitting next to my other stereo gear, tape deck, tuner, cd player, etc. You can pick up a reasonable one on ebay for around $100 or less, so it's just pocket-money. The memory can be upgraded to 8GB, but 4GB is fine to use it just as a music player. Put in an SSD and you're there. You don't need huge CPU horsepower for playing music. It makes a nice stereo component :)
 
blackbird9
I figured out where the cracklings came from.
The issue was not in the settings.
Focal stated it clearly in the headphones manual which came with the headphones that they need to run at 100% for a few hours in order to get the desired result.
Due to not being able to drive them at 100% with my onboard chipset, I never could get them to work to their fullest that is why the crackling.

I only tested them out to their fullest with the FiiO K19 DAC/AMP, because I needed full PEQ, and the FiiO K19 right now is the only device I found which natively supports up to 31-bands from which I need 10.
Another nice thing about its PEQ is that it is lossless and has a variable dynamic range.

Compared the listing today to the last one I had 1 week before, the results are completely different.
I am quite happy and would recommend these headphones + a good DAC/AMP. :)
 
blackbird9 said:
Turns out they still make them... a bit out of my price range, sadly! A very nice piece of equipment.

revox.com

B77 MK III Stereo Tape Recorder

The return of an icon - the new Revox B77 MK III tape recorder NEW! Revox B77 MK III - a new highlight in analog audio…
revox.com revox.com
Click to expand...
My friend has a barn filled with old reel-to-reel machines. We hooked one up a few years back and listened to some old albums on it. Really fun. I wonder if I could talk him out of one of them. His wife says they're all junk and that they need to go.
 
Depends what they are. Anything with a name like tandberg, studer-revox, teac, sony, ampex etc may be worth hanging onto and restoring, in fact items in good condition can be worth a lot of money. If they've been kept dry, the chances they are good is better. Have a look through this list, see if he has anything like these. Akai and pioneer and other good japanese makes count too of course. There are british ones too, like ferrograph, as used by the BBC and some famous recording studios.

The 12 Best Reel ToReel Tape Recorders Of All Time – Integraudio – Audio VST Plugins, Kontakt Libraries, Production Tips, Sound Design, Audio Books, Mixing & Mastering Tricks

integraudio.com integraudio.com
 
I personally made a mistake like that about 20 years ago. I had a couple of old high-end teac top-loading casette decks with broken belts, and a huge sansui receiver, you remember the type, you needed a fork-lift truck to lift it. In the event I needed to make some space and I gave them away to a couple of mates. Years later I see that they are now worth thousands. Definitely check on what he's got before you junk them! :)
 
Revox was always very high quality. I had their B760 tuner for around 15 years.
This one

1742063563534.png



Very nice equipment, really some of the best you can buy in the world.
 
Just tell his wife you are happy to do her a favour and will take the lot away for free, hire a van and go round there and get all of them :)
 
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