Post by Lonely Raven on 04/04/18 at 00:17:24
Audiophile Windows PC Roon, Tidal, and TEAC 503 Ready
I've built nearly 20 of these for locals and forum members. The system is pretty well polished and 95% Plug and Play.
What is this?
What I'm doing is taking reliable Tiny Form Factor Business PCs I buy off lease - I install a clean hard drive with a fresh Install of Windows 10, and I load it up with useful audiophile programs: Foobar2000, Roon, Tidal, Music Bee, and for CD Ripping EAC (Exact Audio Copy) and dbPowerAmp ripper. Since I have the TEAC NT-503 and PS Audio DirectStream I load the appropriate drivers and test in my listening equipment so if you happen to have a TEAC 503 (Decware modded or stock), you can simply plug and play.
What you get
The tiny form factor PC I build is an Intel i5 based full featured desktop computer - it's almost like someone took a laptop (minus the screen) and folded it up into a sturdy metal box. It's got enough horsepower for any audiophile tasks I've thrown at it, even 4x DSD upsampling during playback. The stock PC comes with a traditional 300GB spinning hard disk and I offer SSD (Solid State Disk) upgrades for the cost of the drives.
Why?
I've been an It professional for almost 20 years now. I've built custom gaming rigs featured in magazines and blogs, and I've built Windows based PCs for 3D render farms, photographers and digital artists, and even silent water cooled PCs for recording studios. I understand both the technology and the audiophile side of things, and when I saw others struggling getting PCs going for themselves, I figured I could help the community out by doing all the tedious building, configuring, testing for you, shaving off at least a dozen hours of frustration. I enjoy building PCs, and I've done extensive testing of various software put together a package that's as plug and play as I can make it without being in your listening room with you. :)
Note: this is just the PC, you'll need to supply keyboard, monitor and mouse. These are wired PCs only, I sold my last WiFi based one last week and they are much harder to come by right now.
Here is the pricing for a PC, shipped to your door, and I have a couple in stock as of today 4/3/18.
Base model i5 Processor PC, DVD-R, USB, Video, Network with 300GB traditional spinning disk fully setup and tested: $270 Shipped to lower 48.
Same PC as above with 250GB SSD (Super fast and even quieter Solid State Disk!) $370
Same PC but with 500GB SSD (Great if you're storing all music on PC) $430
Same PC setup for Roon ROCK OS on a tiny SSD (dedicated Roon OS means no Windows = quieter faster Audiophile PC) $300
This was my personal Roon OS PC for the past year.
Please feel free to message me here in the forums or E-mail me directly with any questions or if you want pricing for a custom configuration. (For Example) I've done external hard drives, shipped complete PCs with keyboard and mouse, and I can even take an existing PC and wipe, reimage, and configure it for you! LonelyRaven@hotmail.com
~Eric~
Some real world testing examples: A video of me controlling one of the custom builds from a tablet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ooHwI-q9jo&feature=youtu.be
Another video testing a newly built PC remote controlling it from my laptop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOKjheL_Hck