Building the perfect Windows Based Music Server - Part I
With PC hardware prices as cheap as they have ever been especially memory and hard drives, building a high quality music server on the windows platform has never been so tempting.
With advent of broadband/DSL, music downloading very has become a massive growth industry on the internet and will continue to grow further. Sites like I-Tunes have fueled this growth, and people use the PC to transfer music to their Ipod/Walkmans and more and more are wanting to connect their living room hi-fi systems.
The easiest way (and I would guess the most popular) is to feed the line out from the sound card into the line in on an audio amplifier. However there are a number of factors that degrade the sound quality before it reaches the amplifier, namely the operating system (assuming computer is running Windows XP) and 9 times out of 10 the soundcard as well. The sound quality most windows XP/Soundcards produced can be at best classed as average with poor imaging and depth due to the resampling done by the operating system and more often than not the soundcard.
It is well documented on the Internet how to bypass the XP resampling using WinAmp or Foobar 2000 with ASIO drivers, however what is not so well documented is how to do this using the Windows Media Player which I personally feel is easy to use and has a better interface.
The problem with the Windows XP Audio Engine is a component called the Kmixer (Kernel Audio Mixer) which basically mixes sound from the wave out, cd player, line in, pc board. To do this, if more than one audio stream is presented Kmixer mixes the signals using and potentially could resample signals. It is possible to mute all inputs but the Wave signal so that the Kmixer outputs at just the wave sampling rate (usually 16bit/44.1khz for music) but the Kmixer is not bit perfect as there will always be some DSP volume level applied even if the volume controls are set to 100% (A DTS audio CD will confirm this). This means that any .mp3/.flac file which are usually ripped from CD using a sampling rate of 44.1khz will never ever sound as good as it should do.
So how do we go about bypassing Kmixer as virtually all soundcards can process a 44.1khz signal directly ? The answer lies in Part II
This entry was posted on Saturday November 3rd, 2007 at 8:54 AM and is filed under MP3 Players. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.
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