I have visited this site, amongst others now, many many times over the last 4-6 weeks and have subsequently felt that joining the AMC would be a most worthwhile exercise. I've been in the Electronics and IT industry for about 30 years now and I'm an avid Hi-Fi enthusiast - I've taken a lot of convincing to contemplate ripping all my DVD's and CD's to a PC in the expectation that I will get the same quality reproduction as I do from dedicated audiovisual gear - I'm still not fully convinced, but I 'think' the results appear to be more than satisfactory these days.
So, to this end I am building a new HTPC over the next month with the following specs and hoping to God that I'll be pleased with the results
Silverstone LC20M Case
Corsair HX-520 PSU
Asus P5Q-E Mobo
Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5DF 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 RAM
Intel Core2 Duo E8400 CPU
ATI HD 3850 512Mb PCI-e Video card
2 x 1Tb Samsung SATA II drives in raid 0 configuration
LITEON IHAS120 SATA DVDRW (although I should probably go for a Blu-Ray drive)
Probably J Rivers Media Center software - very flexible, configurable all-in-one software supporting good internal and external encoding/decoding engines from what I can gather.
I currently use a Foxtel-IQ box so not interested in recording TV, but I do want very good HDMI and Optical/Coax output, emulating dedicated AV gear - this is my current setup:
Pioneer 50" Plasma
Celestion A3 front speakers and A4c centre
Linn rears
Harmon Kardon Pre-Amp (upgrading to Meridian soon)
2 x beefy Rotel Power Amps
The most excellent Pioneer DV-717 DVD player for CD playback and the older DVD's
Sony Blu-Ray player (Plays well but a PAINFULLY slow unit)
Pronto RU-990 color universal remote
I'm currently using EAC to rip my CD's to flac format and building album structure on my current AMD64 based system. When I connect the optical or coax outputs from the new HTPC to my pre-amp I guess I'll compare a real CD play to the EAC ripped flac versions (and also try the J Rivers flac rip along with J Rivers and VLC flac playback). I just need to ensure that my pre-amp is doing the DAC process and not the HTPC software - I'll worry about that when I've got it all working ....
DVD playback I'm assuming that the J Rivers will do a good a job as anything unless anyone can recommend using a different external engine - lots of fiddling and fine-tuning ahead for me I'm sure !
This forum has been an excellent source of knowledge regarding Vista/MCE and ripping/encoding/decoding recommendations - thanks to the administrators for maintaining this forum and many others for their wonderful contributions! Now I just need to put it all together and hope that the results can justify removing the dedicated AV players
I'm certainly looking forward to the 'remote' library fast access all encompassing experience !
I'll be certain to contribute my findings once it's all up and running and whilst I'm certainly not a HTPC expert by any stretch of the imagination, I have significant hardware, AV and electronics knowledge, so happy to assist if I can.
Thanks again !!
