I was looking at all different possibility of sources, but it looks like the most optimal solution for me is HTPC instead of buying stand alone CD player and DVD player.

I want to achieve 2 things from HTPC:

1) outstanding music transport to Arcam AVR350. All music when playing movies should go to receiver as well.
2) Play SD DVD at 1080P with visual quality no worse than the top stand alone DVD player (such as Denon DVD-5910 or Arcam FMJ-DV139)

I read about X-Meridian sound card and ATI AVIVO technology. It looks like X-Meridian is audiophile's choice for PC soundcard? Also with the latest catalyst driver, AVIVO enabled ATI card can score 128/130 in HQV test?

Would this mean that HTPC with those component can meet my requirement?

Any thought?

Thanks.

I don't think I can comment on the audio part (am not an audiophile by any measure),
but before you dive into HTPC as video playback device, you should answer the following questions for yourself:

- Do you see a difference in picture quality between Denon 5910 and 1920? 2910? 3930? or Oppo 981 (the last two got Secrets (http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_13_4/secrets-best-of-2006-awards-12-2006.html) best DVD player award for 2006)?
- Is the display device (TV/projector) you use capable of faithfully representing the video stream?

If both questions are answered "Yes", you probably won't be happy with an HTPC - the 5910 is claimed to be better than any HTPC here (http://archive2.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=7597189&&).
In that thread you'll also see how subjective a proper setup of an HTPC can be.

Diogen.

Can an HTPC produce a "better" image than a Denon or other similar player? Since better is hard to measure the answer can be yes or no. This question gets debated a lot and since peoples tastes vary (some like it extra sharp, others don't) there will never be a definte answer. Suffice to say an HTPC can be an excellent DVD player with many benefits that a standalone player can never match.

As to the audio piece, you might try looking into the Lynx sound cards.

MY personal opinion is Yes on both counts, a HTPC properly tweaked
say running theaterteck with FFD show properly configured is more then capable
of producing a HD quality video image that will compete against most every
Upconverting DVD player out there but its definately not a plug and play operation to get it setup initially. AS far as the audio goes The X meridian is a top notch card with excellent reviews although I am not currenty using it ,I use Its little brother
The X-Plosion DTS Card and I love it, Where It really shines is with med bitrate MP3's, but if your source material is recorded in a higher bitrate formate or lossless the card sounds very nice indeed. If playback of a current library is your main issue then the auzentech card are fine, if heavy recording and recording flexibility are a high priority the you might want to look at some of the M-audio cards which tend to offer better input flexibility.

I'd summarize it this way:

An HTPC will always be the most cost effective solution (where time tinkering with the HTPC is not part of the cost) unless:
- you need a simple user friendly solution (e.g. high WAF level);
and/or
- only the very best will be tolerated since money is no object.

A simple and cheap solution would be the Oppo 981 being as good as 970 with audio and 971 with video.
If money is no object this discussion becomes religious.

Diogen.

You might want to consider one of the Denon multidisk players for both tasks. I have had one for a number of years. DVD Audio and SACD are a bonus that put CDs to shame. I don't use a CD player much anymore, I have my CDs ripped to disk and use a PC to play them. It's way more convenient and sounds good enough using 192 KHZ VBR MP3 or FLAC. I'm still trying to find a PC audio player that does everything I want though.

The same goes for video. Hard drive storage is way more convenient than pawing through a bunch of DVDs, especially now that 500 GB drives make terrabyte capacity a reality. You will need one of the latest video cards to get the best DVD playback. Get an audio card that supports audio pass through for DVDs and other DD/DTS sources. That way the audio card does not affect sound quality significantly. The interface can be another issue. Some software supports PC remote controls but a lot doesn't. Program interfaces can be quite slow and unusable as well from an easy chair or couch as well. This will take some experimentation.

A HTPC is a lot of work and the expense can rise significantly with hardware changes or upgrades. It can take a lot of time to get everything set up with the right software and hardware that works well together, especially if you want a high WAF and the best picture quality. Most of the commercial and free software out there does not work well with HD and copy protection can cause problems.

Most of the time I prefer to use a PVR for TV and the wife won't touch the HTPC so it pretty much makes a multidisk player and a HTPC to do everything she and I want.

It looks like newer sound cards can pass "perfect bits" to external DAC (or AVR) via toslink or digital coax. In this case, if I have CDs ripped into lossless compression format such as FLAC and pass PCM bits to AVR and have AVR to decode PCM bits, the sound qaulity should be as good as my receiver's DAC can output.

With Video, later video cards support 1080P/60Hz. So as long as I have 1080P Plasma screen TV and use 1:1 mapping, the out quality from HTPC should be pretty good. Beside, PC offers many optimizing control with video quality.

I don't know why so many people are reluctant to admit that HTPC can dish out top notch A/V performance. I think in the field of A/V, the idea of bigger and more expensive must be better is common.

HTPC is more geek oriented considering it is a daunting task to set up just right even for a seasoned builder. My wife never uses MCE, too much trouble for her she says.
She'll just play the MP3s off the hard drive through the PC speakers with media player. :confused:

It looks like newer sound cards can pass "perfect bits" to external DAC...M-Audio Revolution for ~$100 could do this for years.
Vista will get rid of kmixer and make the audio experience on PCs much better.
With Video, later video cards support 1080P/60Hz.Video card assistance in hidef decoding is very limited at the moment.
I think PureVideoHD will leave the beta stage the moment non-business Vista ships.

Diogen.

Yes... Time....

Oh how much I lost to building my HTPCs.

However, all of the time, $$$ and frustration was fun in the end as I ended up with two well rounded machines that are performing very well for myself AND my wife. She actually preferrs the MCE remote and the MCE interface over ANY of the other STBs that we have owned over the years.

One aspect of the great debate that ended for me was "Which video card is "better"". When ATI built the X1000 series, they decided to equip all of the cards with the same set of video playback capabilities. One of the biggest issues with the NVidia lineup is that there is a huge difference in what is and what is NOT supported by the hardware. One only needs to look at NVidia's own listing of supported PureVideo cards and the features that each card supports. Unless you get a 7600 GT on PCI-E (Or better), you will not have FULL feature support from PV.

As to the claims from ATI about the HQV benchmarks, I decided to order an HQV disc the other week and have had fun playing with it. The ATI cards surely do accomplish what they claim for DVD playback and MPEG2 playback in general.

From a software/interface perspective, I have found the best overall success with MCE 2005, the latest FFDShow at default settings and DVI-D as the connection choice.

And for Audio, I built my main HTPC around an NVidia NForce2 Ultra "Soundstorm" certified board and use the optical out to feed my amp. I can't say 100% for sure but I swear that the sound quality is higher now than it ever has been.

Give this article a read, and I think it might get you excited about some of the possibilities coming with Vista and Media Center. Lossless audio, with realtime balancing via TOSLink. I think you may be impressed (of course it's all theory since I haven't tested it myself).

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=713073

Pete

Someone is probably going to completely contradict what I say, but do you need a fancy audio card, even if you are an audiophile, to get the best sound from CDs if you are connecting an HTPC to a receiver?

In the CD audio world, doesn't the CD drive/PC/sound card just exist to pass 1s and 0s to the receiver via the digital toslink or coax and the receiver does the rest? Therefore as long as you are accurately passing the 1s and 0s then what is the difference in components whether you have a $10 sound card or a $1000 sound card?

I concede that this isn't the case with SACD or DVD-A where the sound card is doing the D-A conversion, but it is the case for CDs and DVDs, is it not?

That depends on if the audio is stereo or not, I believe.

Without blowing a fortune, the better/best cards as of the last few years are the Soundstorm mobos, Audigy 2, XF-I and another one that I can't remember the name of...

Also, this is for sure. Even though you are passing the 1's and 0's to the reciever to process, the data path on the mobo/sound card has to still be proper or there can be infiltration of other digital signals from within the computer onto the audio output. The best example of this is when a hard drive is reading or writing data, there is a subtle digital sounding tick that can be heard if the speakers/headphones are loud enough on a system that is susceptable to it.

One simple way to test your souncard's ability to transfer bit-perfect sound (i.e. bypass Windows' kmixer and using a player that supports ASIO) is to play a DTS wav file using a digital connection to a DTS capable receiver. As soon as the audio stream is touched (at least one bit altered) the receiver won't decode it and you'll hear white noise in your speakers. If you hear the sound, your card can pass bit-perfect audio.(*) And whatever alters the stream in this case (if you hear audible differences) is done on the receiver end, not the PC.

Windows' kmixer problem is volume, it is never 1.0 but 0.999.. instead. There were a few threads on AVSForum devoted to this issue.

Except for the latest mobos (where the sound card is identified by Vista as HD Audio), no on-board sound cards are capable of doing it. At least the early Audigy 2's can't do it either (they resample 44 -> 48 -> 44KHz). I don't think SoundStorm can do it: SS claim to fame is DD encoding of any sound including the non-DirectShow EAX found in games.

The cheapest way to get into pit-perfect audio playback for a long time was M-Audio Revo (they have horrible driver support). Now there are more options, and some of them cheaper.

(*)If you are going to try playing a DTS wav file, make sure the receiver's volume is on very low level or you risk to blow your tweeters if white noise hits them at what you would normally have your receiver's volume.

Diogen.

EDIT: Vista wants you to abandon the receiver and just use amps. For the majority of Vista-certified sound cards (actually 3 brands cover 96% of the market) it will offer fancy calibration features (found today in receivers $2K+) - all in line with MS' vision to dominate the living room.

Vista wants you to abandon the receiver and just use amps. For the majority of Vista-certified sound cards (actually 3 brands cover 96% of the market) it will offer fancy calibration features (found today in receivers $2K+) - all in line with MS' vision to dominate the living room.But how realistic is this? I can't see this happening until a PC becomes the standard method for playing DVDs (as well as HD-DVDs and BR-DVDs) as well as digital cable/ satellite. The chances of that happening anytime soon are between slim and none, and even lower in Canada as we still have little hope of getting a digital cable device for an HTPC.

Why do I say this -the primary and secondary sources for a receiver are DVDs and cable/sat.

Depends on what you mean under "soon"?
It is sort of Catch 22: a content protection system has to prove itself before being used and it can prove itself only while being used. MS got a break in this with the short lived WMV-HD: they showed how "renewability" suppose to work when it was broken (T2 was decrypted using a Japaneese version of WMP9) and then fixed. That gave them enough credibility to co-found AACS with its arch-rival Sony and some other companies (by some reports it uses elliptic curve cryptography; one of the biggest players in this field is Certicom from Toronto).

The hidef DVD development hit a speedbump when Blu-Ray adopted Java in its format (BD-J) and automatically landed MS in the opposite camp (it could be that Sony just wanted it this way). At the moment, MS almost can't lose: they have both, content protection (AACS) and video compression (VC-1) as part of both formats. Beating Sony by not letting Blu-Ray win would be icing on the cake but not really life of death situation (it can be so for Sony with tightly linking PS3 and Blu-Ray).

If AACS can survive for 1-2 years, MS will hit a jackpot.
Cable (with CableCard or whatever comes next), satellite (DirecTV has an agreement with MS, although a lousy one) will move towards AACS or what replaces it (they are skittish at the moment only because they need proof that AACS is not CSS). And at this very moment Vista (Fuji, Venice...) will explode in the living room. Managed Copy on HD-DVD will help, too. MS was planning to have this happen with Vista, but the hidef DVD format split may delay it.

And even if hidef DVDs never take off (for reasons other than AACS failure) and VOD kills them 2-3 years down the road: VOD will need a content protection system and compression technology and MS will be a front-runner in both.

It won't happen tomorrow but most probably will.

Diogen.

One simple way to test your souncard's ability to transfer bit-perfect sound (i.e. bypass Windows' kmixer and using a player that supports ASIO) is to play a DTS wav file using a digital connection to a DTS capable receiver. As soon as the audio stream is touched (at least one bit altered) the receiver won't decode it and you'll hear white noise in your speakers. If you hear the sound, your card can pass bit-perfect audio.(*) And whatever alters the stream in this case (if you hear audible differences) is done on the receiver end, not the PC.

Windows' kmixer problem is volume, it is never 1.0 but 0.999.. instead. There were a few threads on AVSForum devoted to this issue.

Except for the latest mobos (where the sound card is identified by Vista as HD Audio), no on-board sound cards are capable of doing it. At least the early Audigy 2's can't do it either (they resample 44 -> 48 -> 44KHz). I don't think SoundStorm can do it: SS claim to fame is DD encoding of any sound including the non-DirectShow EAX found in games.

The cheapest way to get into pit-perfect audio playback for a long time was M-Audio Revo (they have horrible driver support). Now there are more options, and some of them cheaper.

(*)If you are going to try playing a DTS wav file, make sure the receiver's volume is on very low level or you risk to blow your tweeters if white noise hits them at what you would normally have your receiver's volume.

Diogen.

EDIT: Vista wants you to abandon the receiver and just use amps. For the majority of Vista-certified sound cards (actually 3 brands cover 96% of the market) it will offer fancy calibration features (found today in receivers $2K+) - all in line with MS' vision to dominate the living room.
Just to elaborate on this. There are many sound cards that seriously mangle the audio during the 44>48>44 conversion.

I used to have a SoundBlaster Audigy and the sound out of it was horrible. Took me months to figure out what was wrong as I made the same assumption of assuming the digital out would not get mangled. My MediaPC has a Chaintech card for bitperfect output, but it was a bit of a pain to get it configured. Looks like Vista will solve these problems with new audio hardware that is designed with Vista in mind.