Austin DIY HT Projects (1 Viewer)

[mike_frontier]

DR. J,


what actually makes a great HTPC?


I own a compaq w/ AMD64 w/ 3500 processor. The computer has been gutted and now have a Nvida GT6600 video card and 1.5 gigs of ram (dual channel). I assume maybe a better sound card to add to the list? I looked on the back of my pc and it has a optical input, maybe this can be a great choice of a HTPC?

 

[Colin Dunn]

I could swing by either Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Let me know when everyone gets together to build HTPCs.

I haven't ordered my HTPC parts yet, so I won't be building, just observing...

 

[Hank Frankenberg]

Colin, is that you?? You're coming out for a semi-annual appearance?

If anyone is interested, tomorrow I'm going over to listen to the dipole speakers that I did the MDF for - local Phd student. I haven't heard dipoles in a home environment, and am anxious to hear these. Have fun buildin' PC's!

 

[Mark Hayenga]

Hank, I'd be interested. What kind of speakers are they? Also what time? I will be coming in to town tomorrow sometime.

 

[Hank Frankenberg]

Hi Mark. Thanks for the DVD! I had forgotten about the poker loan.

These speakers were designed by Craig (Selah Audio) for a local customer. The front baffle is 1.5" thick, 12" W x 45" H. The lower 25" has a sub enclosure attached behind it that houses a Seas W22EX. The upper open baffle is an MTM configuration with two Accuton C82's and a BG Neo3PDR.
I'm going to his apt about 2:00 PM. Give me a call: 336-0793. It's 10:40AM now.

 

[Jonathan DA]

An Accuton C82 mated to a Neo3? That's going to be an interesting speaker. Wish I could hear it, but Nils and I are going to start on our PCs around 2:00 as well.

 

[Jonathan DA]

Mike, to answer your question about what makes a great HTPC, the answer is "it depends". HTPC is such a general term that really any PC (wintel, mac, linux, or otherwise) hooked up to a display for the purposes of some kind of video processing qualifies. People create all kinds of configurations to do things like DVD playback, surround sound processing, DVD and CD archiving, Hi-Def recording Tivo style, etc. My end goal is have mine act as a media server for music and movies in a multi-room setup. I also use it for watching HDTV. Check out xlobby.com for the system I'm using.

Your specs above could easily make a nice HTPC, it's all about the software moreso than the hardware.

 

[Hank Frankenberg]

My first impression of those dipoles: Neutral. Yep. They're not broken in, so critical listening would be a bit premature, but I'll say that a good recording of a percussion ensemble did reveal absolute instrument accuracy in the upper octaves of the melodic percussion - extreme detail and high frequency detail and "air". So, It appears the Accutons and RD peacefully coexist in this system. Only listened to a few seconds of female vocal, but what I ded hear of the midrange sounded good. Bass was fast from the Excels. After break-in, more mid and bass listening will be interesting. Down the road, after break-in, I'm sure the owner will let any of us go over for a listen. I'll stay in touch with him. Tubes: he would like to hear some tubes drive the speakers. What do you think?

How do I post a couple of photos of the speakers on here??

 

[Cody Davis]

Does anyone know where I can get white blackout fabric wider than 54 inches? Also can someone suggest a great center channel speaker.

 

[Nils Luehrmann]

Also can someone suggest a great center channel speaker.

Mirus Audio - they can even design it to precisely match your front speakers... and be sure to ask them about doing an accoustical analysis of your room - best investment you'll ever spend on your theater!
I have no idea where you go to get wide blackout material.

 

[Colin Dunn]

How did the HTPC building session go?

I ordered most of the parts I need to build an HTPC last night, but probably won't get them until later in the week or early next week.

In the meantime, can anyone suggest a card that provides both NTSC and ATSC tuners on one board and is compatible with MCE2005? The mobo I selected only has two PCI slots, one of which will be used by a sound card (Auzentech Xplosion with DTS Connect and Dolby Digital Live).

 

[James Phung]

There is an issue with using a dual NTSC and ATSC tuner in MCE2005 last time I checked. MCE requires you to have a seperate card for both. So if you want ntsc and atsc in MCE then you will need an additional card.

I'm using the DVICO FusionHDTV5 USB right now in XP Pro and it works well for me. It works with MCE (according to specs) and it can also tune to ntsc. It's also a QAM tuner so it can get unencrypted channels from cable companies. Unfortunately, Time Warner only has a few HDTV channels available unencrypted (ie, Fox, Nbc, Abc, Cbs, Pbs...no wb/upn). I visited family in houston and tested out the QAM tuning on Houston's Time Warner network and was able to get over 300+ unencrypted digital cable channels, mostly basic digital cable along with broadcast HD but I also found HBO and some PPV channels...pretty interesting.

 

[Jonathan DA]

The HTPC building went flawlessly till I made an amatuer mistake during the OS installation and had to do it all over again to fix my mistake. No biggie. I'll see if I can snap a couple of photos of the system's guts.

I get Fox, WB, PBS, ABC, NBC, and CBS all over ATSC, so I'm not sure you really need to worry about an NTSC tuner at all in Austin. The Fusion that James has, and the ATI HDTV Wonder seem to be the two most popular MCE cards. I use a MyHD card, which doesn't work with MCE but does work with Xlobby.

Are you locked into MCE? There are other, more flexible, options. Like Xlobby, CQC, etc. More work to set up, but more effective in the long run.

 

[Mark Hayenga]

So did you get the software problems worked out?

 

[Jonathan DA]

Yep, everything's groovy now.

 

[Mark Hayenga]

Cool, I'll tell Mitch he's off the hook.

 

[Colin Dunn]

Well, I got some of my HTPC stuff. It remains a work in progress right now...

Still in the research phase on the NTSC / ATSC tuner cards.

I got my motherboard, CPU, case, hard disks, RAM, power supply, and video card. Turned out the video card was defective, so I am going to RMA it on Monday. I've currently got a cheap ATI Radeon X600 in my PCI-E slot (got it for $39 at Discount Electronics) as a temporary stopgap until I get a working GeForce 7900GT card.

This has been one of the more problematic PC builds I've done so far, and I'm not even into the HT / audio part yet.

The GeForce 7900GT card would only work in the second PCI-E slot (x4), not the first (x16). That was the case even with the jumpers set for a non-SLI system (which it is). Then later in the evening it quit working completely. That ended my first evening of work on the system.

This morning I went and got that Radeon X600 just so I could confirm that it was the video card and not the motherboard. Once I verified that, I set up SATA RAID-0 and started loading MCE. It reported corrupt files and the install failed.

So then I had to go to plain old SATA, which worked well enough to load MCE. I got the video and network working, then went off to the net to get a BIOS update for the motherboard. After flashing the BIOS, the system would not come up - black screen, stuck in a loop of doing continuous resets. I couldn't even open the door on the DVD burner because the system resets were happening so frequently.

I was just about to rip out the motherboard so I could RMA it, and then I noticed that the jumper to clear the CMOS was in a different location than I had thought. So I moved the jumper and applied power one last time ... and the system came back up! I tried tweaking some BIOS settings and got the continuous-reset problem again, but this time I was able to fix that right away. (For some reason it doesn't like me caching the system BIOS, but only on the new firmware.)

So then I booted up again and got the latest drivers for everything in the system and burned them off to a CD. During this time I noticed that performance was only slightly better than my old Athlon XP 2400+ system. I chalked that up to not having tweaked everything yet ... and kept moving forward.

Then I went back and re-enabled SATA and tried to install MCE again. This time, I was able to get through an MCE install to a SATA RAID-0 without errors. But after the final reboot, the system reported an error with the SATA RAID array. One of the hard drives was no longer responding.

For some reason, a power-cycle fixed that (temporarily), and the array was still intact and I could boot MCE. After loading some updates and drivers I rebooted again, and got that array error again. Another power-cycle worked around that, so I updated to the latest SATA RAID drivers from nVidia's site (rather than the motherboard manufacturer's site). Since then I haven't had the drive drop out of the array, but I'm not sure I trust it yet.

While loading drivers and researching problems I also found out I had installed memory incorrectly, causing the system to use it as single-channel DDR333 rather than dual-channel DDR400. Putting the memory in the correct slots for a dual-channel configuration (slots 2 and 4 rather than 1 and 2) made a dramatic difference in the performance of the system.

At that point I was running stably enough to see if I could do a little overclocking. I loaded up the nTune application and bumped up the FSB by 10% (from 2000MHz to 2200MHz). Then I ran Prime95 for 4 hours without errors. So it looks like 2200MHz is a safe speed, and in my next session I will try for 2300MHz and see if I get there without excessive heat or crashes.

 

[Hank Frankenberg]

Doc, Tubes: I'm going back to the customer's to listen to those dipoles again this weekend and to pick up my clamps. Do you guys want to go with me?

 

[Scott Oliver]

Sounds kinky, Clamps!
Give me a call when you settle down on a time, I am interested.

 

[Hank Frankenberg]

Whips and chains I can understand, but CLAMPS as kink?

I dunno. Somebody help me work through this.

Tubes: around 2:00 ish