Building a DIY Music Server

[baconbrain]

Everyone,

 

Some time has passed, so I thought a brief update regarding my DIY Build would be in order.

 

After assembling the server internals, I contemplated if I wanted to place the ULPS inside the Taiko Chassis or not. Looking at the available space, I began to question if there would be enough room for a modified V3 build. Having owned an Innous Statement Server previously, I was quite impressed by the solution (and SQ) of isolating the server and power supply.

 

Prior to making my decision, I reached out to @Nenon for his opinion. I told him that I was looking for a modified V3 build which could handle a Roon / Hqplayer configuration with realtime upsampling for a Asus Sage dual CPU (possibly at full utilization) setup. Having dealt with @Nenon for a couple previous solutions, I had full confidence in his level of expertise and recommendations.

 

He proposed a V3 Build with the following upgrades / modifications:

• Hammond 195J10 chokes
• Large Taiko Cap
• Saligny Power Rectifier
• Mundorf Angelique Wiring

 Given the size of the chokes and other components, the question of where to place them was solved, and I decided to pursue an external housing solution resembling the look of the Taiko DIY Chassis with Jaeger connectors.

 

Given that I really have no experience in assembling power supplies, I asked @Nenon if he knew of a source within Europe who could perform the work for me? (Yes, I outsourced the DIY portion this time, shame on me). He provided me a reference, which I feel did a fantastic job in assembling the build.

 

Here are a few pictures of the build:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Challenges

 

Actually it was smooth sailing during the entire process with one exception. Given the weight of all components (36 kilograms), we got a bit nervous if the ULPS would survive shipping without bending / flexing the chassis. The baseplate in particular was the main area of concern. @Nenon ’s source came up with a creative solution by reinforcing the baseplate with some solid aluminum profiles:

 

 

 

 

Last but certainly not least

 

As most of you in the community are already aware of, @Nenon ‘s  services were absolutely top notch. I highly recommend him if you are looking for a very professional and creative expert in the area of DIY Power Supplies. His communication is extremely timely and always courteous. A super big thanks to @Nenon !

 

Both units in my Headphone Rack:

 

    

[baconbrain]

6 hours ago, drjimwillie said:

 I plan to install one 2TB drive now and others later. Is this incremental installation of drives going to cause me problems? To get one continuous library will I need to erase the first drive when I install the second one?  I don’t know much about this stuff, and I am trying to plan for the future, wondering if it would be an advantage to buy two drives now?

 

No, the incremental installation is not a problem at all. You just need to be aware of the proper placement order of the M.2s when populating the Hyper X Card. 

 

This KB Article is quite useful: https://www.asus.com/de/support/FAQ/1037507

[baconbrain]

1 hour ago, di-fi said:

Can it be any Intel NVMe 2TB , or was 660P recommended (somewhere)? and 670P?

Thanks for posting the English version, I copied the German one by mistake.

 

I am not sure if there was a particular reason for recommending the Intel SSD but the Hyper X card will recognize just about any M.2

 

Perhaps one thing to consider is the operating temperature of the M.2 given that some of them get pretty hot and normally one does not want to have the Hyper X cooling fan running in a passively cooled music server.

[baconbrain]

43 minutes ago, di-fi said:

sorry I was not clear, I meant a reason other than compatibility, for example sound quality (I tried many).

 

 

it probably has been mentioned before besides someone here who covered his SSD with heatpipes but to increase heat dissipation you could install individual M.2 SSD heatsinks, quite efficient. The 'double sided' type that does not fall off when mounted vertically. And omit installing the Hyper X Card cover for increased airflow. Maybe in this way the cooling fan will not have to come on.

 

Interesting idea! Actually I have been pretty happy with the cooling ability of the Hyper X Heatsink even without the fan. My Crucial P3’s and PNY M.2’s run between 40 - 45 degrees celcius but the Mushkin Tempest M.2’s were running between 60 - 70 degrees celcius when idle! I had two of them installed in one of the Hyper X cards and one directly on the MB (per pic below). Ended up removing all three of those space heaters and replacing with the Crucials. ;)

 

 

[baconbrain]

On 2/14/2023 at 11:30 PM, Johnseye said:

 

There are some RAID options to consider if going that route. You can create an array out of these drives. 

 

 

While on the topic of storage, I thought adding Taiko Audio's comment regarding their recommended Raid Configuration for the Extreme Server might be helpful:

 

The Extreme uses Microsoft Storage Spaces to create a drive pool in which you can add drives to dynamically expand a single storage volume. Storage Spaces supports placing drives in RAID, we do however not recommend this. RAID 1 (mirror), is sonically transparent but means you will store all your DATA twice on local server storage. RAID 5 is less wasteful as it only requires 1 parity (redundant) drive for your whole drive array. However RAID 5 is sonically very harmful reducing the local file playback quality to regular SSD level.

Therefor we recommend to always keep multiple copies of your music library, for example internally stored on the SGM and on a NAS or external drives.

The SGM can be accessed over the network to execute remote backups.

[baconbrain]

31 minutes ago, Johnseye said:

My server's Asus Hyper X card is not RAIDed, just separate drives but that was only because I'm using Euphony and don't believe there's an easy way to RAID it.  Now I won't even consider it.

 

I struggled with the decision to format each M.2 drive as ExFat ensuring Euphony compatibility, versus the recommended Windows Storage Space setup, and decided for the later as I didn’t want to spread my library across 10 seperate drives. Not sure if I will stick with it as I do like Euphony alot …

[baconbrain]

1 hour ago, Dev said:

Their will also be an impact of SQ on which playback software you use. For Stylus, I don’t much impact between physical vs logical drives. For Roon users (like me), the impact can be substantial. From what I gather from different experiments with Roon 1.8, is that it constantly accesses the storage media, even if all processing are turned off. So my guess is logical volumes/drives might give a better SQ. This is just a hunch as I will not be able to experiment with Euphony due to lack of tools support. Maybe I will try AudioLinux at some point but being a heavy Roon user and for these reason I have moved my Roon storage from multiple m.2 drives locally in the sever to a DIY NAS where I have a single large 3.5” drive which gets backed up in another Raid 5 based ZFS pool.

 

Interesting observation…

 

I moved my library from a NAS to the current local setup because I felt that Roon Performance suffered through network incurred latency, etc.. Perhaps it was just related specifically to my network, or library size, but I do feel the performance has now improved significantly with the files stored locally.

[baconbrain]

Fyi, attached are the recently released Taiko Audio Product Summaries for those interested ….

 

TACDA & TACDD DAC & Interface Summary_v15.pdf

 

Taiko BPS Summary_v3.pdf

 

Taiko Network Card & Switch Summary_v18.pdf

 

Taiko Router Summary_v7.pdf

[baconbrain]

16 hours ago, BCRich said:

Hi everyone,

Does anyone know the spacing of the Mounting Hole’s on the Taiko Rectifier? A cut sheet maybe.

Thanks….Mike

 

Mike, you can reach out to Taiko directly under the address [email protected]

 

My guess would be that they can provide you with the info and are normally pretty quick in responding.

[baconbrain]

I posted a question to Taiko the other day regarding the timelines for the availability of their USB Card to non-Extreme owners. Here the response:

 

The USB card availability for DIY hinges on other new product releases from our side. Please note we cannot make our USB drivers available for DIY for multiple reasons, but we will make our TACDA / TACDD drivers available.

 

 

[baconbrain]

On 2/23/2023 at 6:54 PM, JackJohnson316 said:

I have some questions about ram. Since I run my OS (Euphony Stylus) on ramroot, and my music is played from ramroot, I'm wondering if tinkering with my ram will make a sound quality improvement? I currently use Apacer industrial ECC ram. 

 

-Do ram coolers heat sink products make a difference? (heat, vibrations, etc)

 

-Does adjusting the ram speed make a difference? (is faster, slower, or matching the cpu speed better?)

 

-Does adjusting the ram voltage make a difference? (better lower or higher voltages?)

 

-Do I need to fill all of my ram slots in my motherboard for optimal playback? I currently have two of the four ram slots filled.

 

Thanks

 

Thanks for addressing the topic. These are all very good questions and unfortunately it is an area which I have not yet really explored. Without wanting to sound like a Taiko Audio Fanboy, the following is a brief overview of their focus areas pertaining to RAM and improving SQ:

 

—————————————————————————————————

Addressing memory modules:

One of the largest disturbances on server music playback quality we found is DRAM refresh. The charge on DRAM memory cells weakens over time therefor it needs to be refreshed in pre-set time intervals. During the refresh period all memory operations halt. Memory current draw peaks during refresh, a single memory dim can easily draw 2.5A or higher during the refresh cycle. This is the main reason for DIY community feedback that fewer, or lower speed, dimms sound better, which can be true except you're seriously limiting bandwidth as you have more then just a single memory channel in modern high performance systems.

With the EVO we started focussing on reducing the amount of refresh intervals and refresh period time with quite significant advances in playback fidelity. For this to work you need a higher then average selection of memory chip quality, close chip matching and keep temperatures as low as possible. For the EVO we bought virtually all available consumer level dimms and selected those in which we could get the lowest memory refresh rate / length. As it turned out quality varies from dimm to dimm, so on top of that we started cherry picking the best of the bunch.

For the Extreme we took this a few steps further, these dimms have factory pre-selected A-grade memory modules, all dimm components (memory chips, capacitors, resistors etc) are matched to within a 1% tolerance and selected for low current draw. The side effect of this is refresh rate burst current is reduced by almost 50% and operating temperatures are much lower allowing lower refresh rates. Combined with power supply filtering this allows us to use 12 memory dimms with a very high combined bandwidth at very low refresh noise levels.

 

—————————————————————————————————

 

Given the variety of RAM Modules, Mainboards, and BIOS versions we use within the DIY Community, it is probably difficult to come up some recommended setting which would be beneficial to all but I would also welcome any experiences, suggestions, or best practices from others in this area.

 

BB

 

[baconbrain]

1 hour ago, drjimwillie said:

 

 

it looks like I did😎

I also checked the specs to make sure that it has 48 lanes. It does.

What I find interesting is that it tells you which PC i.e. slot to use depending on which CPU you want it associated with and it tells you the limits of how many cards it will read. 
I thought this info would be good to share  

 

I can confirm the following for the Xeon SP CPU:

 

PCIeX16_1  4 M.2 recognized 

PCIeX16_3  2 M.2 recognized 

PCIeX16_5  4 M.2 recognized 

 

I assume that the actual number of M.2’s recognized will vary depending on what components are populating the remaining PCIe slots and their channel requirements. 

 

 

[baconbrain]

Apologies if this question has been asked previously (no luck with SuFu) but I am curious as to the average CPU operating temp (ideally the Xeon 4210) for any owners of the Taiko DIY chasis? Thx.

[baconbrain]

9 hours ago, seeteeyou said:

Not sure if anybody were able to grasp the enormity of these experiences shared by @romaz recently?

 

https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/qsa-lanedri-series.36078/page-2#post-847711

 

https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/qsa-lanedri-series.36078/page-8#post-855877

As good as the SGM Extreme is, at this point, my nVidia TV Shield Pro, this $200 piece of gear that has no right to be fed data from an expensive QSA Gamma Infinity LAN cable and powered by a Paul Hynes SR4 LPSU with QSA Silver fuse and a Gamma Infinity power cord was outperforming a $30k music server that I consider to be the best in the world. Compared to the Extreme, the nVidia device sounded a touch more forward than I would like but otherwise, dynamics, sound staging, air, clarity, and tone were either on par or better than the Extreme now. It was bad enough that until I got the Spectra back yesterday, I had decided to shut down the Extreme.

 

😲 I will definately need some time to digest that statement.

[baconbrain]

30 minutes ago, Toymanmark said:

My Temps on my dual 4210 across all 20 cores according to Euphony v4 range from 32-38 degrees. This is after playing music for hours on end! This is Stylus alone with no upsampling! Yes this is in the Taiko case. Curious what temps you are getting?

 

I also wanted to thank you for your heroic efforts on reviewing so many power supplies. It helped tremendously in picking my path.

 

 All I can say is a Sean Jacobs based supply I built is incredible. I did 3 x 5 volt rails for Network card USB card and the OS m.2 femto card.

Hi Toymanmark,

 

Are the values quoted in Degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit? If they are in Fahrenheit, then they are very low compared to mine. My Roon  / HQPlayer Server has been playing music for the last 8 hours (Oversampling to 384 / 32 PCM) and both CPU's have been running at approx. 60 Degrees Celsius.

 

I can live with the 60 Degrees but feel it could be improved. Are you using the Taiko supplied Heatpipes or something else?    

[baconbrain]

10 minutes ago, MarcelNL said:

32 F is the freezing point of water ;-) Pretty sure that are temps in Celsius.

 

Good one! Someone wasn’t thinking ;-)

 

Completely agree on the lower the better. Trying to figure out if I did a poor job with my cooling setup or if the DIY Chassis is working as designed.

 

[baconbrain]

9 minutes ago, Toymanmark said:

What are your temperatures like at idol nothing playing and temperatures as you go from 44.1 files+?

 

They are in the mid 40’s at idle. I have all PCI slots currently filled including 10 M.2’s which are contributing to the overall system temperature.

 

Upsampling increases the power consumption by approx. 10 watts per CPU which raises their temperature to approx. 60 degrees Celsius. 

 

The event which got me a bit concerned was when I commited 4 cores of one CPU for some Roon File Analysis. The temperature then raised to 90 degrees which was getting a bit to hot for my taste. A bit disappointing given that one still has 16 additional cores which could be utilized. All that horse power and no where to put it …

 

[baconbrain]

6 minutes ago, kennyb123 said:

I’d be happy to loan you mine.

 

Jeez, I just sold mine a couple of months ago. If I only would have known … ;-)

[baconbrain]

20 hours ago, Toymanmark said:

My Temps on my dual 4210 across all 20 cores according to Euphony v4 range from 32-38 degrees. This is after playing music for hours on end! This is Stylus alone with no upsampling! Yes this is in the Taiko case. Curious what temps you are getting?

 

I also wanted to thank you for your heroic efforts on reviewing so many power supplies. It helped tremendously in picking my path.

 

 All I can say is a Sean Jacobs based supply I built is incredible. I did 3 x 5 volt rails for Network card USB card and the OS m.2 femto card.

 

Everyone,

 

Just wanted to let you know that the "heroic efforts" which @Toymanmark were referring to above are meant for Audio Bacon. Although Audio Bacon and I share a passion for Music and a certain breakfast meat, we are not one and the same, and I certainly don't want to take credit for someone else's hard work.  

[baconbrain]

54 minutes ago, Johnseye said:

 

It's also well timed with the February half off sale.  With a lot of people buying these cables now, we should get a lot more opinions and see if everyone's world views will change as a result ;)

 

Btw, I just heard that the half off sale will be extended until the end of March (not kidding), so with some luck, one can have their game changing new products just in time for April Fools Day! (sorry but I couldn’t resist) 😁

[baconbrain]

2 hours ago, seeteeyou said:

How much time should we spend on improving the SQ of software then? Maybe work on the features instead?

 

I still believe that at least 60% of SQ improvements are software related.

[baconbrain]

7 hours ago, seeteeyou said:

BTW, it's never too late for anyone to join the party since we just managed to reach yet another milestone

 

http://jplay.eu/forum/index.php?/topic/4410-windows-11-pe-audiophile-creation-guide/?p=63442

 

Great project! Btw I echo the thoughts of this member:

 

http://jplay.eu/forum/index.php?/topic/4410-windows-11-pe-audiophile-creation-guide/?p=63518

 

[baconbrain]

9 hours ago, Tubeman66 said:

A Small tip
Buy an SFP NIC that is based on the intel i210 chip
Download the installation script for Takio SFP NIC
Then you have a really good solution for a fraction of what the Taiko NIC costs

And it sounds wonderful

 

Have compared it with Startech SFP NIC
and the Intel card sounds much better

 

 

 

Digitus 10160 SFP Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express Card Network Interface Controller : Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

 

 

Good one! Any heat issues with the Digitus Card and which SFP module are you using?

[baconbrain]

5 hours ago, drjimwillie said:

The downside of mounting the PSU externally is the two extra connectors and the extra length of wire.  

 

 

Will, I decided to go the external PSU Housing route given that it made more breathing space available for the mobo (plus PCIe components). I also wanted to have some playing room for future modifications going forward. 

 

Although Taiko decided to place everything in one box, there are many manufacturers who propogate separate enclosures. Which of the two truely offer the best sonic benefit, and to what degree, is something which I cannot answer. Imo it probably really comes down to personal preference and what is more important to you. I can only tell you that I am quite happy with my external solution using jaeger connectors and the shortest possible length of wiring between the two.

[baconbrain]

On 5/27/2023 at 4:01 PM, Nenon said:

Is anyone interested in any of my Troels Gravesen DIY speakers? I am trying to do some cleaning up and make space for the new speaker system I am working on (happy to share more on that when completed). 

 

I have a pair of Troels Gravesen ATS4-HE speakers I've built a few years ago. 

http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/ATS4-HE.htm

I have spent over $10K plus ~200 hours to build these. Willing to sell them for around half of my cost. 

(they also have 12'' down firing woofers on the bottom that are not visible on the photos). 

 

Very impressive and beautiful finish!