Pandora As Hifi Separate

[MrPoletski]

well i'm a bit of a fREaK when it comes to hifi and spend waayy too much money on speakers and amps (gotta be over 4 grand by now).. well actually it's not nearly enough money yet but I'm getting there.


anyway, I figured thew setup I have in my room could be brilliantly augmented at night by using the line out from the pandora into my hifi, instead of using my loud whirry pc, or my considerably more limited cd collection in a player I can't reach for getting out of bed.

I was wondering what the audio quality is expected to be like? what are the dacs like? snr? crosstalk?


oh and will I be able to do the thing I've forever failed to be able to do and get an app to put a notch filter on the output so I can eleminate room modes to stop boomy as hell bass. Apply a notch filter with a reasonable level of accuracy from about 30-120hz (everything I ever found was parametric at best over the whole range with fixed adjustment frequency points) Just finding something to do that would be an ENOURMOUS plus.

 

[mindlord]

This thread should hold all your answers: especially the referenced site by Mweston.

 

[Miner49er]

anyway, I figured thew setup I have in my room could be brilliantly augmented at night by using the line out from the pandora into my hifi, instead of using my loud whirry pc

The pandora could be great for this but on related note - why not silence your PC?

I did this, as I have a MythTV frontend Pc in my lounge and it was VERY noisy. In fact so noisy my missis refused to watch films on it! So, I silenced it. Here's how:

First I Replaced the PSU - I didn't get the most exspensive, it was about 40 quid. That reduced the noise considerably but still it was noisy. So next I replaced the CPU fan, again nothing special just a new one basically (about 10 quid) but it made a huge difference. Yet, still it was too damn noisy! So, after pusing my finger onto the Graphics card fan, I noticed it went very quite. I found an old (similer spec) ATI graphics card with a heatsink instead of a fan and swapped them over. The silence was almost deafening after that but still something was not quite right. In the end it was the hard drive that had to go (that thing was so noisy when everything else was taken away!). For the HD, I had an old iRiver mp3 player that my brother destroyed by putting the wrong power supply in, so I took the tiny 1.8" HD out, consulted ebay for a suitable IDE cable (about 2 quid!), installed and copied over the OS (dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=4096) and hey-presto I now had A COMPLETELY SILENT PC for a few quid and a few hours of my time. That was about 3 years ago and it's still running and it's still silent. It really is worth doing.

Sorry for going on there and going way of topic.

 

[MrPoletski]

The pandora could be great for this but on related note - why not silence your PC?

hehe, here are my specs: corei7 920 @3.7Ghz, radeon 4870x2, twin SSD raid boot drive + twin WD raptor raid data drive + 2x 500GB storage. I have a fanless 1Kw PSU but a dual fan true ultra 120 heatsink and a bunch of case fans.

as it is, on a hot day it still overheats if used for too long. Getting it silent without a risky and costly venture into water cooling just aint gonna happen.

but lowering the spec of my PC has an infinitely lower chance of occuring!

IMHO the best target for quietening my pc would be an aftermarket cooler for my GPU but... I'd rather just use my pandora because aside from anything else, it won't wind my electric meter round at 500rpm during the night

 

[MrPoletski]

This thread should hold all your answers: especially the referenced site by Mweston.

I can't find that link...

 

[fiori_musicali]

This thread should hold all your answers: especially the referenced site by Mweston.

I can't find that link...

http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/tps65950.html

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/forum-62/announcement-27-the-list-of-things-you-dont-do/

 

[Poem58]

Why does this link above and the one earlier that took you to another thread with a link from Chip both indicate that the Audio chip has an FM receiver and possibly a transmitter in it?
Am I just not reading that right, as the link in the post above me, the PDF it looks like it's suggesting an antenna input through the same route you would hook up the microphone. I thought I saw somewhere one of the Mobile Internet Devices (Nokia?) someone "found" an FM function hidden in the software or something. I know in this case there would not be any hidden software but the question is could someone write something and make this work? I don't imagine I would use much FM radio on my Pandora, but like the idea of it and possibly of an FM transmitter. Even if it's highly unlikely, just want to know if it's at all possible. The more uses for a Pandora the more it seems like a do-it-all device. Just curious.

 

[dflemstr]

@ everyone interested in HiFi sound on the Pandora:

IIRC, it (the Pandora) will use PulseAudio for its sound system. This means that you will have a complete software mixing system built into the little device. Some features this gives you:

• Stream audio losslessly over any network to another computer or device: WiFi, Bluetooth, USB etc
• Down- and upsample anything to anything. You can have a 5.1 96 kHz audio file playing, and it will be downsampled with one of many choices of resampling algorithms for the internal speakers (it has all of the SRC resamplers from libsamplerate so you can pretty much do resampling without any change in SNR at all) but might retain its quailty for another simultaneous output stream.
• Plugins that can do anything you want with audio streams, including equalizers and such things etc. This probably doesn't interest you.

Point is that you don't have to use the Pandora's sound card if you don't want to. If you have a machine with S/PDIF and a small USB sound card that can serve as a converter, it's possible to use it. Or if you have a huge computer with some über soundcard, then you can use it -directly- over a network.

 

[marshal]

Personnaly I would try the output from the TV-cable once I get the Pandora. If the quality is not satisfactory enough try getting a USB sound card.

I personnaly bought a EDIRORAL UA-1X usb soucard 2years ago for quite cheap (~40$) and it works quite well. I'm definitely going to try it on my Pandora if only just for fun.

 

[MrPoletski]

@ everyone interested in HiFi sound on the Pandora:

IIRC, it (the Pandora) will use PulseAudio for its sound system. This means that you will have a complete software mixing system built into the little device. Some features this gives you:

• Stream audio losslessly over any network to another computer or device: WiFi, Bluetooth, USB etc
• Down- and upsample anything to anything. You can have a 5.1 96 kHz audio file playing, and it will be downsampled with one of many choices of resampling algorithms for the internal speakers (it has all of the SRC resamplers from libsamplerate so you can pretty much do resampling without any change in SNR at all) but might retain its quailty for another simultaneous output stream.
• Plugins that can do anything you want with audio streams, including equalizers and such things etc. This probably doesn't interest you.

Point is that you don't have to use the Pandora's sound card if you don't want to. If you have a machine with S/PDIF and a small USB sound card that can serve as a converter, it's possible to use it. Or if you have a huge computer with some über soundcard, then you can use it -directly- over a network.

Actually, equalisation interests me greatly, but kind of off topic from the pandora as I'd use that at low volumes with my hifi.

with my Pc, however, that is a totally differnet matter. I can literally shake the doors off my room by hitting the right bass resonant frequency and this is damn irritating. I'd like to notch filter these room modes out of my bass. My searches for any kind of app to do this have been fruitless. The best I ever find are poorly made winamp plugins that offer very coarse equalisation at lower frequencies. I want to be able to very accurately equalise between 20 and say 200 hz. Perhaps with several notch points and placed with an accuracy to a single hz.

 

[rabidpoobear]

Actually, equalisation interests me greatly, but kind of off topic from the pandora as I'd use that at low volumes with my hifi.

with my Pc, however, that is a totally differnet matter. I can literally shake the doors off my room by hitting the right bass resonant frequency and this is damn irritating. I'd like to notch filter these room modes out of my bass. My searches for any kind of app to do this have been fruitless. The best I ever find are poorly made winamp plugins that offer very coarse equalisation at lower frequencies. I want to be able to very accurately equalise between 20 and say 200 hz. Perhaps with several notch points and placed with an accuracy to a single hz.

I'm guessing by your system you're running Windows. Have you tried Foobar with George's VST wrapper to run Electri-Q ? It's a parametric EQ that has a free version that is very good. You can place as many points as you want and if you click them you can set them to specific values and depths and widths. Just sine sweep and find your bass resonances and EQ them out. I use it to EQ my headphones to reduce my ear canal resonance. It makes a huge difference and the EQ doesn't introduce any artifacts (just don't boost, just cut). (I have Ultrasone Pro 750s and I listen to FLAC stuff through an M-Audio Delta 1010LT at 96khz and it sounds fantastic.)

 

[MrPoletski]

Actually, equalisation interests me greatly, but kind of off topic from the pandora as I'd use that at low volumes with my hifi.

with my Pc, however, that is a totally differnet matter. I can literally shake the doors off my room by hitting the right bass resonant frequency and this is damn irritating. I'd like to notch filter these room modes out of my bass. My searches for any kind of app to do this have been fruitless. The best I ever find are poorly made winamp plugins that offer very coarse equalisation at lower frequencies. I want to be able to very accurately equalise between 20 and say 200 hz. Perhaps with several notch points and placed with an accuracy to a single hz.

I'm guessing by your system you're running Windows. Have you tried Foobar with George's VST wrapper to run Electri-Q ? It's a parametric EQ that has a free version that is very good. You can place as many points as you want and if you click them you can set them to specific values and depths and widths. Just sine sweep and find your bass resonances and EQ them out. I use it to EQ my headphones to reduce my ear canal resonance. It makes a huge difference and the EQ doesn't introduce any artifacts (just don't boost, just cut). (I have Ultrasone Pro 750s and I listen to FLAC stuff through an M-Audio Delta 1010LT at 96khz and it sounds fantastic.)

That sounds like 3 separate applications. I'll google it and see if I can find it...

 

[rabidpoobear]

That sounds like 3 separate applications. I'll google it and see if I can find it...

Yes.
VSTs are programs that do audio processing. Electri-Q is a parametric EQ that's written as a VST. Foobar 2000 is a very good audio player (it's the one most people recommend on sites such as head-fi and avsforums.) however, foobar doesn't come with VST support. Some guy named George wrote a VST wrapper plugin for Foobar. There are others too, but his is very easy to use.
Foobar has no eye-candy. It's all about minimal resource use and performance. So don't expect fanciness and visualizations like Winamp. Do expect very fast startup, virtually no performance overhead, and an extremely customizable user interface with a pretty neat plugin system.

Read this headphone equalization article, he'll show you how to use sine sweeps and Electri-Q. Just ignore the headphone-related part, and do the sweep for your bass frequencies.

Sorry about the terse reply before, I was just leaving class and I wanted to post before I shut off my laptop because sometimes it breaks forms after suspend.

 

[tristankin]

You could just install FFDShow and create a bandstop filter at that particular frequency.

Then in winamp move your audio file types to the directshow decoder and they will all be passed through the filter.

You can also upsample you audio and other fancy things too.
http://www.reaper-x.com/2006/07/13/ffdshow-guide-to-improve-your-audio-files-quality/


FFDShow is better known for its range of video post processing options but I find its audio postprocessing much more interesting.