iPods have better sound quality than the plastic speakers on my computer can deliver, and there's been little improvement over the years. People are still playing low-bitrate mp3s, which have been with us since the 1990s. In a world where the BBC can pedal MP2 DAB and get away with it, perhaps no one cares about playing music from computers, but I do. Oh, and maybe Naim does too...
The options for improving computer sound are essentially:
- Use the best sound card money can buy and hang some decent speakers and a proper amp on the end of it. The best sound cards are about £150 and have analog and digital outputs. But my motherboard already has digital out, so it's unclear to me that this is going to be any better than the built-in digital out: the sound is not being processed by the computer either way. Hence improving the sound card would appear pointless, unless you're going to use the analog outputs from it. In any case, you still need an amp and speakers. These cards seem to be aimed at gamers with the better-quality computer speakers, or "home cinema" applications with multi-channel sound. Not quite what I need.
- Find an amp which takes digital (S/PDIF) input, pipe the sound straight out of the PC and feed it into the amp and speakers. This makes most sense to me as the less processing my computer does with audio the happier I am. The computer doesn't exist to produce hi-fi, and to judge by the speakers you can buy from the computer shop it probably never will.
At the moment the hi-fi manufacturers don't seem to have really spotted a market for this type of use and there's not much available at Richer Sounds. A couple of old-school hifi companies, Linn and Naim, do have offerings which appear to do the job. I didn't check the Linn, but the Naim box looked like something I could use so I listened to one and bought it.
The Naim UnitiQute was launched sometime in 2010, but they're fairly rare and as far as I can tell my local HiFi shop had never seen one. "Naim UnitiQute" is apparently pronounced "Name Uniti Cute". It's a half-sized black box which weighs about 7.5Kgs and looks a lot like half a Hi-Fi amp. The front's got nothing much other than a green display and a light-up logo (which doubles as a mute switch). There's a USB socket which won't read NTFS format sticks, a 3.5mm jack input, and a 3.5mm headphone output which is useful and suggests that putting the box on the desk next to the monitor is fairly common. The back's more interesting, with lots of technical looking connectors of all different types. Obviously there are speaker outputs, but there's also a WiFi antenna, mains input, and two pairs of S/PDIF digital inputs (two coax, two Toslink). The WiFi (or cat 5 cable input) is for streaming from uPnP media players, or internet radio. The S/PDIF plus WiFi are the obvious inputs for me, as all my stuff is digital.
The UnitiQute is a £1,300 integrated amp/ receiver / media player. With this plus a pair of £1,500 speakers I can:
- Play FM radio. It will also play the BBC's mp2 DAB should the BBC manage to foist this numpty system on the UK. Yes, we can hear the difference, and so can they. Their engineers must be cringing.
- Stream music from internet radio stations. Quality is variable, from 64kb/s to 256kb/s. Not hifi but "iPod quality".
- Play music from old CD players via analog or digital links, not that I care.
- Stream music from uPnP servers, for example my NAS or my PC both of which have those built in.
- Take an S/PDIF output from my PC and play it, providing possibly the world's most expensive PC "beep". Or providing a sound output for a media player like iTunes which sounds better than anything Apple ever imagined.
However there's a cost to being at the bleeding edge. It's not all plug-and-play...
1 Playing Computer Sound
Take the S/PDIF "Toslink" lead and connect the optical digital output from the PC into the digital input of the player.
Actually it's a bit more complicated than that. The input sockets may have little plugs in them which obviously have to be taken out and lost, and the link cable's male ends probably have the same stuck on them. Once that's done, you also need to check what Windows is doing to the sound before it pipes it out... take a look at the "playback" devices and tell Windows what's supported and what's not (there's a handy dialog which allows you to test each format and sample rate. In my case I needed to tweak a few things here in order to get the best from the UnitiQute:
- Set the default bit-depth and sample rate to "studio quality".
- Disable "enhancements".
- Test and add the supported bit-depths/ sample rates.
Once that's done, this is a neat way to avoid the compter's sound card mangling the sound. This works for general computer sound and also playing music from something like Media Monkey. Press the "PC" button on the Naim remote and assuming it's correctly assigned then the computer noise plays as expected.
Apparently you can get "LoFi" and "HiFi" variants of the Toslink cable. It's digital and optical, and it can either deliver the bit rate or it can't. Needless to say I opted for the LoFi version.
2 Playing Ripped Audio Over uPnP
Here's where things get a little more complicated. One uPnP player is much the same as the next - it's a standard, after all. Right? Sort of...
First of all you need to decide what you're going to stream. Nearly every uPnP player assumes it's lossy compressed audio "mp3" in common parlance. If you want to play mp3 audio, that's easy enough. But you'd not be wanting to play that through reasonable quality qudio gear as it just doesn't have the detail needed. If you want CD-quality then you need to losslessly rip the data, else you're throwing away information and you'll inevitably end up with something which sounds worse than the CD. The equation's simple: either use a CD player directly, or losslessly rip the data from the CD and play that.
2.1 Lossless Media Formats
There are a few choices at the moment, all of which the Naim will play:
- WAV, which is lossless but un-compressed. This is actually fairly widely supported, but WAV files are large and it seems wasteful not to compress them.
- FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is unsurprisingly free and lossless, and it's an audio codec. Assuming space/ bandwidth is not infinite and processor power is plentiful then this is an attractive choice.
- Apple Lossless, a proprietary Apple format.
Of those FLAC is the obvious choice. Apple's famous for "lock-ins", and although you can convert to and from Apple's format with various tools I don't want to tie myself to what they think my future should be.
2.2 FLAC Rippers
There are a limited set of Windows tools which will rip FLAC:
- Windows Media Player will not, although you can modify it to play FLAC.
- iTunes will not, preferring instead Apple Lossless.
- Media Monkey will rip WAV or FLAC out of the box, but in the 64-bit Windows version will play neither (it's apparently a defect...).
- Foobar2000 will rip and play FLAC and convert from one thing to another
I'll run with Media Monkey for now.
2.3 uPnP streamers
These allow media from the PC's hard disk (or from my DNS323 NAS, but that's a different story) to be streamed to the Naim. So no media player needs to run on the PC, just a uPnP server, which is just a souped-up file-server which sucks the FLAC from the hard disk and pipes it over the network to the player.
There are several options for a 64-bit Windows 7 server, listed below. Note that some streamers will transcode down to mp3; generally you can configure this to turn it off. Wikipedia has a list of current uPnP servers. One problem with these is that they're trying to support lots of different types of "media" - specifically video and stills in addition to audio. Whilst that may make sense for some, it's meaningless to me and just makes these things more complicated than they would otherwise be. The Naim doesn't play video!
uPnP servers for FLAC from Windows 7
| Player | Notes | Summary |
| Windows Media Player |
Windows 7 has a media streamer built in: just connect the WiFi to your router, open the Windows Media Player sharing up, point the Media Player at your audio, and all your sounds are available. Except it won't stream FLAC (even when tweaked). You can stuff grungy mp3 into HiFi gear, but there seems little point. |
No streaming of FLAC.
|
| iTunes |
Won't stream directly, and in any case won't recognise FLAC. You can use Allergro Media Server (commerical) to stream an iTunes music library, but it won't stream FLAC. It would presumably stream Apple's proprietary format should you like that. |
No streaming of FLAC even with additional commercial help.
|
| Twonky |
 Costs money, but it will play and stream FLAC out of the box. The interface seems to be designed for TVs and is a little nasty on a large resolution computer display, but it does work and it's stable. Unfortunately there's no way to filter it so it shows only FLAC files (by default it shows all files in a directory), which is a pain if you're storing both. |
Fine except for TV-style UI and lack of list filtering.
€14.95
|
| Subsonic |
Looks like a streaming media player, but contrary to what Wikipedia says it is not a uPnP streamer, although it's an interesting idea and may evolve that way. |
Not uPnP.
|
| XBMC |
I believe that the name stands for "X Box Media Centre". I know what an x box is, but that's about as close as I intend to get to the things. The software does run on a Windows PC, but it seems designed for concoles. That said, the UI is flashy and it certainly looks good. I could make it stream headers but not songs, and it was unstable on 64-bit Windows 7, latest build. |
Unstable. |
| Foobar2000 |
Looks to be useful and well supported, but the interface is terrible, at least as shipped out of the box. As far as I can tell uPnP is a plug-in, and I lost the will to live trying to work out precisely how to plug it in. It's a shame that the user experience is so poor as the tool looks so promising. I'm a programmer, but I don't expect to have to get my debugger out just to listen to a bit of music. I gave up on this one. |
Too much hard work. |
| iSedora |
This one's also commerical. The default install path is c:\ which isn't encouraging. Running the program gives a Java virtual machine error, which is worse. This is standard 64-bit Windows 7, which they claim to support. Checking their FAQ, I note: 'On Vista and Windows 7 installation under "Program Files" folder is not supported'. Ok, try again with the default options. No soap - no uPnP server visible, although I saw it trying to get through my firewall. Looking at their site it's all Mac screen shots; I think this is probably a Mac program with a weakly supported Windows port. It took me a while to clean all the gunk the uninstall left on my machine. Poor show guys, that's just rude. |
Unstable.
|
| Mezzmo |
I crashed it a few times on install. I think that's possibly because by default it tries to make a library which includes images, and my system has more images on it that they probably expect. Don't worry, they're not that sort of image, I have a few cameras is all. Still, not a good user experience. It plays media through Windows Media Player, but streams FLAC out of the box. It will only rip lossy formats however. Promising client monitoring and configuration options. |
$29.95 |
| Asset |
 Another commerical offering ($26), this one related to "dbPowerAmp", which is perhaps better known for ripping software. Actually the license seems to imply that the uPnP server is free, which would be good. Works out of the box as a foreground uPnP server; one click and it's a service (which is what I want). Neat and slick: point it at the audio and it streams it. More control over list formats than others. |
#1, Asset Rocks and the uPnP only version is free.
|
| The DNS 323 NAS |
 My NAS comes with a free uPnP server and a few other bells and whistles. It works fine out of the box as perhaps you'd expect. The only downside is that you have no control over anything, other than the root location of the files. So you can't for example, tell it to only stream (and list) FLAC files; it always lists both FLAC and mp3 files together. That's a real pain, although one it shares with Twonky. |
Solid but can't list only FLAC.
|
So there you go... there is in fact less choice that may at first appear. Asset is the only viable choice for streaming from my PC. The NAS streams fine but is clunky without a restructure of my library (to separate FLAC from MP3 etc).
3 How does it sound?
Red. Or blue, or possibly pink. It's a trick question, isn't it?
Does it sound good?. I just paid three grand for this - how unbiased an answer are you expecting? It sounds a lot better than the plastic Logitech speakers it's replacing!
With my iPod or old computer speakers 128k/ 256k was pretty hard to differentiate and both sounded horrid, which is what you'd expect. On the Naim it's fairly easy to tell the difference between internet radio stations: 32kb/s (BBC World Service); 64kb/s (unlistenable music stations); 128kb/s (general music stations, Radio 2, 4); 192kb/s (BBC R3); and 320kb/s MP3 (Linn). Linn's radio sounds like you'd expect, like HiFi. When I'm bored I'll code something well produced in 320kb/s and FLAC and see if I can tell which is which double-blind. Note that these are all MP3 encoded, not MP2 encoded as the BBC's old DAB is (I've not bothered with DAB partly for that reason).
Which reminds me... whilst researching this I came across a breed I thought died out years ago: "Hi Fi people". Apparently they think that they can hear the difference between music streamed from a hard disk versus that streamed from a USB stick. It's true: you can fool some of the people all the time.