A NAS + a DAC = bye bye CDs
It has been a busy summer, but I finally got some time over the past few weeks to work on making the most of the NAS that I had built a few months ago. There were 2 reasons why I built the NAS: 1) to have lots of local storage, which I accomplished since it is 2 TB; 2) have some redundancy, since it is in a RAID 5 configuration; and 3) migrate my CD collection to it. So the NAS has been running rock-solid for the past few months, therefore I felt pretty comfortable in taking it to the next step.
Since my end goal was to be able to listen to all of my music through my 2-channel, Naim system, I needed to insure that the quality of the source material was lossless. Obviously, this meant that I had to choose from one of many lossless formats. After doing some research, I decided to go with FLAC, since it is non-proprietary and widely supported. I then used the Mac based ripper called Max, which allows you to rip to both FLAC and MP3 formats at the same time. I needed to rip to MP3 in addition to FLAC, because iPods and iPhones do not understand FLAC.
Once I had all of my CDs ripped, I then needed to consider how to convert the digital content to an audio input for my amplifier. This is the purpose of a DAC (digital to audio converter). Every soundcard has a DAC, albeit lousy, built into it, which is why you can hear music via the headphone jack. But in order to extract as much detail and musicality from the source material, you really need a dedicated, high-quality DAC. Since this was my first foray into the world of DACs, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a DAC, but I also wanted to ensure that the DAC was on par with or better than the sound of the Naim system. After a bit of research and based on the recommendations in the Head-Fi forums, I decided to order the VALAB DAC for $200. It is a non-oversampling DAC that has a very vinyl sound to it. It also has the benefit of being amenable to significant modding, which is why I also purchased a soldering iron.
The next thing I needed to consider was the software that I would use to play the music and what type of user interface would I use. I was loathe to use a laptop for this, because I really wanted the ability to have a remote in hand and browse the catalog and change music. A Mac Mini was overkill and too expensive. The solution to this came in the form of the Music Player Daemon (MPD), which is a client server based music player. Basically, the server contains the player and will play whatever it is told to by the client. The client can be another computer or any IP based networked device, for example, an iPhone. In order to get this solution to work, I needed to have a small computer that was fanless, silent, consumed very little energy and was of a small form factor. I discovered this blog post called the Cheap Silent USB Linux Server that matched my needs exactly. I followed the directions to a tee and am very pleased. I had to order a Alix 2D2 motherboard and case for about $140. I then threw in a 1 GB compact flash card into and installed Voyage Linux as the OS. With this setup, I can view and play my complete music collection from my iPhone using MPoD and it will automagically start playing out of the Naim system.
How does it sound, you may ask? I am simply astonished! There is so much more detail revealed and the soundstaging is expansive and this is all attributable to the DAC. This setup has truly re-invigorated my ear for music and I’m listening to music from my collection as if it is brand new and completely different than what I had listened to before. This was a real shocker to me, since my CD player, the Naim CD 3.5, was purchased for $2000 about 10 years ago. I need to spend many more hours listening to music to get a better sense of what other improvements and tweaks I can make. I know for a fact that I need to either make or purchase some acoustic treatments, since the room is very bright.
So, to summarize, this is what I ended up with:
- Music is stored on the NAS in FLAC format
- It is streamed over ethernet to a small, AMD Geode based device, which is running MPD
- The music is outputted in FLAC format over the USB port to the VALAB DAC
- The DAC converts the digital input to analog output and sends it out over RCA connectors
- The RCA cable then connects to my Naim amplifier
- I control what is being played from my iPhone using MPoD
This is a networked diagram of the final result.
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