New Project: The "SilentCUBE" High-Res Audio Playback PC

[-E-]

I just completed this new build for, of all technophobes, my father. His old getup was an aging Dell XPS laptop connected to a M2Tech HiFace USB along with an external USB hard drive. It was loud and obnoxious, but it sounded pretty damn good. Or so I thought it did.

Upon realizing it was time for a (significant) upgrade, the route of a dedicated, and near silent, yet full-featured PC was the next step in the evolution of his entire home theatre. That, and him spending countless hours ripping his entire CD collection to FLAC. If that external drive died, tears would probably be the least of my visual worries of what my father may actually do.

I figured, hey, I can build something better than anything out there.

Primary goals:
1. That can store more than any SoolooS could ever dream of at a fraction of the cost while providing higher data security and redundancy (I'm a stickler for thorough and secure networking)
2. Have it handle a massive database of songs (right now cresting 19,000 title entries, not including long whole-CD length rips) - but to be able to do any searching, indexing, or playback near-instantaneously
3. Have it be quieter than just about anything the competition offers
4. Have it still be a full-featured PC, allowing the full gambit of functionality
5. That it not only sounds better than the old system being replaced but that would put to shame other playback boxes on the retail market.

With those goals in mind, building a supreme PC that can pack that kind of a wallop while simultaneously being near silent (or at least about as loud as mouse fart) takes considerable thought to achieve.

After some due diligence and research, I figured on the following build list:
PC Case: Lian Li PC-V351B "Cube" (The system was going next to the couch, not in an equip rack)
CPU: Intel Core i7-2600K
RAM: Corsair Vengeance, 8GB, matched to the system
Motherboard: Asus P8P67-M Pro, MicroATX motherboard
Video: HIS Radeon 5570, fanless
Hard Drive: OCZ Revodrive X2, 100gb
Power Supply: Seasonic 460W, fanless
Optical Media: Lite-ON BD-R
Misc: A boatload of Dynamat Extreme, and a couple of 120MM case fans that have a combined output of 11.7 dB.
Storage Unit: Synology Diskstation DS411+, 4-bay RAID NAS, filled with 4x Seagate 2TB 7200 RPM enterprise-class drives

(Picture 1 shows all the goodies)



(Picture 2 shows the case in the box - where all the goodies must fit)



(Picture 3 shows the NAS with the drives)



Building the Beast:
The next set of photos shows the extensive dynamatting that ensued. Basically, any area where I could stick my fingers or roller into got sound treatment. The result? The box turned from a beautiful, lightweight, aluminum unit into a beautiful, sound-deadened beast. Smacking, tapping, or otherwise provoking any sort of vibration from the case resulted in a simple "thud."

The pics closer to the bottom show the replacement Scythe 120MM fans. They spin at a very slow 800 rpm, and push around 8.7 dB each at about 33 CFM of airflow. It was more than enough for this build, and even though combined they equal <12 dB, which is about as loud as a leaf gently falling to the ground, I wanted absolute isolation and control of what airflow there was in the machine.















The next post will go over the hardware...

[-E-]

The hardware, as listed in the previous post - is probably what some may call "bleeding-edge" technology. Those people would be absolutely correct. This motherboard was fresh off the production line from the recalled Intel fiasco (called the B3 revision), the chip just started shipping in January (but then halted due to the recall, even though the chip was unaffected), and the "Hard Drive" is the second generation of the wildly ambitious OCZ SSD line.

Here's where I'll talk a bit about what other websites have commented on regarding any type of spinning media - especially when on a local machine. In short: spinning media sucks. It's slow, prone to failure, and can introduce significant noise into your playback - not necessarily your actual audio stream (some have argued that this does happen, though), but rather the noise that the platters make when spinning at ridiculous RPM. Seriously, they are loud. Especially if you have a few of them stacked together (because one is just a bad idea, that is why RAID is included in everything today).

This "Hard Drive" is not any normal Solid-State-Drive (SSD), either. It completely bypasses the typical SATA interface, which is how normal drives plug in. Instead, this is a card, similar to another add-in card, like a video card, that slides right into any PCIe x4 slot. By avoiding the entire SATA realm, you greatly increase speed. And I mean by leaps and bounds. The final boot-up of this machine is almost unreal: ~9sec from pressing the power button until your windows login/password screen, and ~7 seconds after you put in the password until you are fully functional on the system (going through the standard startup anti-virus jargon, etc.) Keep in mind none of this system is overclocked. It is running dead-stock for one main reason: heat. This thing has to remain operational with the barest minimum of airflow in order for silence, and heat is death for computer equipment. This brings up yet another huge advantage of SSD, and especially PCIe SSD: 1- there is no spinning media, therefore no friction, therefore no HEAT or NOISE, and 2- since it plugs directly into the PCIe x4 slot, there are no additional cabling required to get in the way.

The following pics go over the hardware and the basic installation. The little tube called "Arctic Silver" is probably the best thermal compound on the market today, and is used between the CPU and the heatsink. You will notice the funny copper looking heatsink on the motherboard once it is installed. This was not on purpose. The first plan was to run a PASSIVE CPU cooler. However, even on the first boot, I started to notice the temps get out of control - so I had to shut down and install the stock Intel CPU fan. Thankfully, these newest generation i7 coolers are small, very quiet, and spin very slowly under average load. It did not affect the overall sound output (mouse-fart-sound-pressure-level-approved).

(Pic 1)


(Pic 2)


(Pic 3)


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(Pic 5)


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(Pic 10)


The next post will go over the cable management, the NAS, and the final product.

['cisco]

Nice work E .....can't wait for the completion

So when are you going into production for AA members? cost? music loaded into it?

[-E-]

I'm going to start with the pics first in this one then give the whole commentary below...


















The first few pics show to the extent of my compulsion for cable management. Within PC cases is one of the biggest bears of a task to accomplish, or accomplish well. Utilizing simple flex tubing and pressure fitting of cables, and also a nice open cavity on the roof of the case, any cables you see coming down to the motherboard are a straight shot, doing its best not to impede any of the airflow. Also you will notice the tuck-away of the cabling in the picture of the front of the machine (where the intake is) - I didn't want to hinder what little air the box received, so every effort was made to accomplish this.

The next few pics show the NAS - or Network Attached Storage - array. They are running in a RAID10 setup, so there is 4 TB of usable storage. This thing is FAST. Over the network (gigabit ethernet), pushing over 100MByte/sec was commonplace. It makes USB, Firewire, even eSATA - a joke. The reason I picked the Synology was primarily recommendation from other IT geeks like myself, they swear by this one - and they were spot on. Between the speed, ease of installation, and probably one of the finest web-GUI control panels I've EVER used, the Synology is no joke. If you need high-speed and data fault tolerance, look no further.

The last two pics show the system installed, with a pretty new Samsung PX2370 LED LCD screen. The screen is no more than 1" thick at any point. Also, and sorry for the cabling snafu - but that pic was taken as I just set it up, the montior HDMI cable and power cord are now flex-tubed and hidden along the leg of the table - out of sight, out of mind, right?

The final piece was just a small wireless keyboard and mouse.

So, the verdict?

This thing is f'ing amazing. Sorry - I don't know any other way to really put it. The HiFace has taken on a whole new life. The sound quality is 10 lightyears ahead of what was in there before, and the dynamics and overall feel of the "resolution" of everything being played feels like a thick blanket was taken off. Bass response is significantly tighter, mids and highs are more three dimensional, imaging is staggeringly improved.

His system is not a slouch by any means, either. B&W N802 fronts, HTM1 center, N805 rears, Velodyne HGS-12 sub, McIntosh MX132 pre/pro, MC402 for the fronts, MC207 bi-amping center & rears, and MC7205 for multi-zone. How the whole setup "came alive" after all this time blows my mind.

Conclusions?

Quality of hardware in the PC is just as important as the sound card for playback. He's still using the same USB->S/PDIF converter and the improvement is night-and-day. If the budget allowed, and a regular-sized ATX motherboard could be used, I would opt for a Lynx AES16e card with a custom WireWorld DB25->AES/EBU connection. That is the only way this could have any sort of improvement.

The SilentCUBE is, in fact, silent. It is about as loud as a mouse-fart, assuming you put your head next to the rear of the machine. There is no power supply fan, no hard drives, no extra cooling fans, just two huge and slow-moving low dB fans and a CPU fan.

Dynamat is your friend. The difference in the "feel" of the machine was dramatic after installing all the d-mat.

Full-featured and functional HTPC/dedicated audio boxes are quite possible to create, configure, and utilize. This machine could easily do Blu-Ray playback over HDMI, given the right location for it (equip rack and a TV that can support it).

Removing the spinning media and archive is extremely important for two primary reasons: 1- you lower the total noise output within the room you are playing back on, and 2- you create a redundant array - in other words - your data you spent all those hours ripping, organizing, etc - becomes fault tolerant. Worst case scenario, two of the 4 drives can fail in that NAS simultaneously, and I would have zero data loss (not to mention if a drive begins to degrade I receive an e-mail to my main business account AND to my cell phone).

Dad has 4 terabytes of extremely fast access data and music (only 1tb is already taken up) and can playback any bitrate of music available today. Simply put - there is NO spinning media player that can compete. Sorry to all of you in the CD player camp - but this is the one place that technology has come forward, if you are willing to do it the right way. He's also learning how to use JRiver very well - as "even a caveman can do it."

Cheers.

[-E-]

Originally Posted by 'cisco

Nice work E .....can't wait for the completion

So when are you going into production for AA members? cost? music loaded into it?

Production can be at anytime. I have the XLS spreadsheet at home, and you could customize however you want. Based on the amount of time required for retrofitting the case (any case really) with the Dynamat, along with replacing case fans, and properly installed/wire managing everything, plus system install and configuration (also helping you transfer any existing data over) you are looking at best case scenario of 5 hours, worst case 10+, so figure ~$750-$1500 for the labor. Of course, if enough people jumped, I may be able to create some sort of economy of scale

Due to the a-holes at RIAA, the only thing that will get "posted" is "whatever music you currently have and want ported over to your new NAS."

[skunark]

What backup drive did you use?

['cisco]

Originally Posted by Vesuvius

Production can be at anytime. I have the XLS spreadsheet at home, and you could customize however you want. Based on the amount of time required for retrofitting the case (any case really) with the Dynamat, along with replacing case fans, and properly installed/wire managing everything, plus system install and configuration (also helping you transfer any existing data over) you are looking at best case scenario of 5 hours, worst case 10+, so figure ~$750-$1500 for the labor. Of course, if enough people jumped, I may be able to create some sort of economy of scale

Due to the a-holes at RIAA, the only thing that will get "posted" is "whatever music you currently have and want ported over to your new NAS."

Sorry, let me correct myself for any RIAA-holes out there that are lurking....I have plenty of music here....just wanted to know how the labor of transferring that music to the "Silent Cube" would cost.

E...I'm sure all the hardware you purchased must have cost a pretty penny too? Let's see if there's any other AA members out there that would jump on"The Cube".

[-E-]

@skunark - can you rephrase your question? You asked in past tense, so I'm not sure what you mean exactly since the present-tense of what I did was stated (with pictures).

@cisco - None of the music goes onto the PC, it all goes on the NAS - the good news is once you get it on your network, you can do it very easily, and very quickly (shows up as a share on your network - it's just that easy).

It's not that expensive compared to some of the other products out there; again, when I get to my office tomorrow I'll open up the spreadsheet and jolt my memory as to the total costs.

['cisco]

Sorry E....I guess I'm a newbie or misunderstood your "Cube" more than I thought.

I'd better read your thread again and google the whole NAS thing....

[-E-]

Sorry, I briefly explained it, but the snapshot of a NAS - or Network Attached Storage - is this:

It's (typically) another little box that does nothing but store hard drives, and can setup a RAID (where multiple hard drives appear as a single "drive" - and have things like fault tolerance and redundancy, so that if one or more fail, you are still online - basically, you reduce your risk of ever losing one piece of data).

This little box goes somewhere that will attach to your home network (usually in a different room - since they do make noise from the hard drives and fans, like any normal computer). Once it is on your home network, you can access it from anything that is connected to your network - mac/pc/smart device, a lot of home theatre receivers and pre/pros today also have network capability to look for a NAS or other storage device (like another PC) and stream music directly from there.

The purpose of the NAS is to house data - in this case music, all the music you can shake a stick at (this one in particular is setup for 4 terabytes of usable space, which is equal to about 8000 or more full 80-minute CDs in FLAC). Since you are doing nothing but streaming data - you can have a variety of source material, just like you would keep on your normal PC - and since it is blindingly fast, it really appears as if it is locally attached or inside of your own computer - except it isn't.

The Cube is Windows 7-based PC, albeit very fast and very quiet, built primarily for dedicated audio playback, whereas the NAS is the little box that houses all the music in a different room, streaming, or sending the data to the PC on-demand.

Hope this clears is up a little more (perhaps to a light-mud color now?).