Tin
Club Member
Back around Christmas, Newegg had a great deal on an Atom D510 barebone and 2GB of memory for the great price of $120 shipped. Ive always wanted to build a dedicated music/movie server, and I felt this was the perfect ticket. The system itself has a rather small footprint, smaller than a standard DVD player, although it is a tad taller, but not too bad. I chose Vortexbox as my OS, as I felt it would be perfect in that its a dedicated music server distro based off of Fedora 14. I had a spare 1TB hard drive laying around, so in it went, and off I went.
As you can see, there really isnt much to the system. It was kind of a pain in the ass to assemble, as some components dont fit the conventional way.
For the sound card, I picked the Audiotrak HD2 Advance DE, which is a dedicated stereo sound card. Audiotrak cards are made by Egosystems, who make studio-grade equipment for digital audio workstations. Not a gamers card, but thats not what this is for...music only. It uses a fully differential output (audio geek talk for something that has no crosstalk) and uses 3 socketed dual opamps. The stock opamps had to go, and in their place, I put much higher end units sourced from Digi-key...one of the most renowned electronic components around. The new opamps match the noise floor of the DAC (digital to analog converter) at 120dB, and have a much higher bandwidth, so as to let every minute detail in the music be heard.
Here she is in all her glory, fully assembled. It looks rather nice sitting on the rack too.
...and the back of the unit...note the true analog RCA outs on the sound card. No wimpy 3.5mm headphone jack there.
Then it gets sent to the speakers via those lightbulb things
.
Everything is controlled through my phone, web browser, or my Logitech remote...works like a charm. Vortexbox is a very good OS...better than any other Ive seen for a music server. You insert a CD, and it rips it automatically with no user intervention. All tracks are ripped to FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) by default, and all ID3 tags and album art is retrieved as well. This thing also rips DVDs to various formats. Not only does it rip CDs to FLAC, it also mirrors them to mp3 and Apple Lossless for you iPod/mp3 player folks. Total cost of components, including stuff I had on hand was ~$300. Pre-built systems of equivalent capability cost upwards of $1000...much more in many cases. Id say I did good...and it has been rock solid since day 1.
As you can see, there really isnt much to the system. It was kind of a pain in the ass to assemble, as some components dont fit the conventional way.
For the sound card, I picked the Audiotrak HD2 Advance DE, which is a dedicated stereo sound card. Audiotrak cards are made by Egosystems, who make studio-grade equipment for digital audio workstations. Not a gamers card, but thats not what this is for...music only. It uses a fully differential output (audio geek talk for something that has no crosstalk) and uses 3 socketed dual opamps. The stock opamps had to go, and in their place, I put much higher end units sourced from Digi-key...one of the most renowned electronic components around. The new opamps match the noise floor of the DAC (digital to analog converter) at 120dB, and have a much higher bandwidth, so as to let every minute detail in the music be heard.
Here she is in all her glory, fully assembled. It looks rather nice sitting on the rack too.
...and the back of the unit...note the true analog RCA outs on the sound card. No wimpy 3.5mm headphone jack there.
Then it gets sent to the speakers via those lightbulb things
.Everything is controlled through my phone, web browser, or my Logitech remote...works like a charm. Vortexbox is a very good OS...better than any other Ive seen for a music server. You insert a CD, and it rips it automatically with no user intervention. All tracks are ripped to FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) by default, and all ID3 tags and album art is retrieved as well. This thing also rips DVDs to various formats. Not only does it rip CDs to FLAC, it also mirrors them to mp3 and Apple Lossless for you iPod/mp3 player folks. Total cost of components, including stuff I had on hand was ~$300. Pre-built systems of equivalent capability cost upwards of $1000...much more in many cases. Id say I did good...and it has been rock solid since day 1.
