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Your Computer Based Transport Setup

I am on the verge of moving to a Mac or Windows based transport setup but I am not sure which route to go.

I am pretty good with computers so a custom pc setup is what I have decided because of:

1. economically better than packaged music server
2. ability to experiment and change settings and software

However, I do not see a lot of info or thoughts on peoples computer based transport setups, (or ones that or pretty recent considering how fast the computer landscape changes so fast)

I will be going through a Chordette QuteHD dac to a Bryston 4b SST amp.

So, what is a good looking and performing computer setup?
Do you like mac mini's, big macs, windows 7 or 8 and any pro's and cons?

I am leaning towards a mac mini with something like audirvana. The mini is a nice looking small format and the OS is pretty solid and it runs quiet and cool from my experience.

Thank you fellow computerphiles.
photonman

Showing 2 responses by rlwainwright

rlwainwright
1,904 posts
 
I have almost 3TB of digital files housed on a Seagate 3TB USB drive, cost was about $120. I religiously back those up to 2 Seagate 1.5 TB drives. Cost on those was about $65 each.

For backups, I'm using a very nice free program I found on SourceForge, it's called Create Synchronicity. You can schedule the backups to occur unattended any time you like. The interface is dead-nuts simple to use and it works perfectly.

I play the files back using my Oppo BDP-93. This is hard-wired to my router using an Ethernet cable. I can play them back using the Oppo's interface (a little bit clunky, but serviceable) or any DLNA capable software like Foobar 2000 - also a free program.

Including the cost of the Oppo, I have about $750 invested. It sounds terrific and is very easy to use. And one of the nice things about the Oppo is that I can playback movies (NTSC and PAL) in hi-definition (1080P or 720P) as well as music files (multi-channel, up to 24 bit, 192 kHz) , giving me a total home theater solution for a very easy to swallow price...

-RW-
rlwainwright
1,904 posts
 
One thing I forgot to mention is that I am using a 4 year old Toshiba laptop (Satellite, A505-6980) which has an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.2 gHz. I am running Windows 7, the latest version.

It has 8GB of RAM and a 500 GB drive built in. The cost on that was about $700 when I bought it. Newer models from Toshiba are blazingly fast and cost about the same.

Setting up a PC-based playback system is really quite easy to do and the cost for the performance you get is really quite low. If you have not looked into PC-based playback, perhaps you owe it to yourself to look into it. I think you will be quite pleasantly surprised...

-RW-
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