The Untold Tales – Asus Xonar HDAV Opamp Power Supply

 

Here’s something that will catch out the unwary.  While attempting to upgrade the opamps on my Asus Xonar HDAV and H6 daughter board, I discovered that there was a limit to the amount of discrete opamps (from Burson Audio) that the card will take – and I’m not just talking in terms of physical space!

So here’s the story.  I had already upgraded the stock opamps in the main card to the Burson Audio discrete modules (check out http://www.bursonaudio.com) with some pretty speccy results.  So naturally, being me, I wanted more, and so I purchased some additional Burson modules to upgrade the filter (forward) section opamps for the centre/subwoofer, side surrounds and rear surrounds as well as the I/V section opamp for the centre channel on the H6 daughter card.

Initially, this seemed to work well, but on closer listening, I noticed that there was some crackle evident particularly in the centre channel.  Also more distortion than I would have expected from my newly acquired Anthem PVA7 and Paradigm CC490 centre channel speaker.

Frustrated, I went back to the Burr Brown OPA627AP opamps on the daughter card and everything seemed to work without any crackling (although, as good as the Burr Brown’s are, I had lost some detail and tone ).  I tried all the Burson opamps again with the same results, so at this stage I thought the drivers might have been the issue.  I uninstalled the existing drivers and then tried to install some unified Xonar drivers that I found only to find that they wouldn’t even detect my card!  Gaaaahh!  Same thing happened with the drivers direct from Asus when I tried to reinstall them – again, Gaaaaahh!  Removed the Burson’s, put the Burr Brown’s back in, reinstalled the Asus drivers and everything detected and installed fine.  Tried a few combinations and found that the drivers would not install with any more than 2 discrete opamp modules on the daughter card (in addition to the 3 on the main card).  Everything was pointing to an inadequate power supply to the daughter card (which is sent through the ribbon cable).

 

I have the power!  (Or do I?)

The Burson’s are designed to run at a minimum of +/- 12V which is what I thought the Asus was running at (seems logical as it was taking its power from both the PCIe +12V supply and the additional molex +12V supply – don’t know where it gets the –12V from, but hey, I’m not an electrical engineer!)  So naturally, I thought that the upgraded opamps on the main card were drawing too much power and reducing the available power left to run the upgraded opamps on the daughter card.  My idea was to locate the +/- 12V opamp power supply pins on the bridge connector, “disconnect” those from the ribbon cable and attach a +/- 12V direct power supply from an additional cable from the main PC power supply.

My first lack-of-knowledge hiccup – a molex connecter on a PC power supply only includes +12V and ground, but no –12V.  Hmmmmm…

After hitting this wall, I thought that I might as well see if I can locate the pins anyway.  I found a +12V, but no –12V – WTF?  Checked a few more pins, found the standard 3.3V and 5V pins as well as some strange pins running at +/- 8V.  “Surely not?” I thought.  Checked the V+ and V- pins directly on each opamp, and yep, +8V and –8V.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - Asus, you fools!!!  I still thought it might have been some sort of voltage drop from a lack of supply from the main card, but I checked the opamps on the main card, and again, +8V and –8V.

F#*k!!!

 

Where to from here?

Well, I’m seeing 3 options.  The first one I’ll definitely take, but the other 2 I’ll investigate just out of curiosity and if I can save up some money.  After all, I’d like to let others know of my experiences so that if anyone decides to take up the challenge of following in my footsteps, they hopefully won’t run into the same challenges.

Option 1 – Build a custom +/- 18V power supply to run the opamps

I’ll definitely need some advice and help in this area.  Working with mains AC voltage is not something I’m exactly qualified to do, so I may have to delegate.  At the end of the day, if I can get something that I can connect the +/- power pins (pins 8 and 4, respectively) on each of the opamps to, then I’m pretty happy.  Even happier if this power supply is regulated to within +/- 1% or better.

Option 2 – Buy an M-Audio Delta 1010LT card

This card has 8 analogue outs and is generally regarded as a very good sounding card.  Mind you, I believe it uses the NJM2114D opamps found in the I/V section of the Asus, so could be pretty sub-standard to what I am wanting to achieve.  Although given that this is a PCI card, and PCI supplies –12V as well as +12V, maybe it can at least provide the appropriate power to run everything.

Option 3 – Buy 2 Lynx 2 B cards

These cards are apparently awesome.  2 analogue inputs and 6 analogue outputs, runs on PCI (again, hopefully, can provide decent power to the opamps), and lots of professional praise from many high-end users.  Trouble is, at $899 a pop, this will take a while to save up.  They use (again, I may be wrong) the Analog Devices OP275 opamps which I haven’t as yet heard.

 

Well that will do for now.  More stories to come, as well as the continuation of the main story – stay tuned!

Design Goals and Implementation – Part 3

 

OK – time to get into the last 2 bits of the PC.  This is the sound card and the BluRay drive.

 

The BluRay Drive

I figured for this one that I should go to the source of all BluRay evil and pick a Sony.  I figure if they can’t get the technology right for their own creations, then there’s no point to anything.

Sony have had a reputation for excellent technical implementations, with very poor (could you call it Draconian?) marketing – remember BetaMax?  Sony tried to enforce their own rule that any movie company that put their movies onto the BetaMax format had to pay Sony a royalty – from memory, not just once per movie, but for every tape sold.  FAIL!

Sony also got into a bit of hot water over some of their music CDs produced under the Sony BMG label that contained additional content (malware) that automatically installed whenever you placed it in a PC CD drive.  FAIL!

And now, Sony finally got their wish to receive royalties for every BluRay disc and player (hardware or software) sold because they were able to convince the movie companies that their format provided the best copy protection.  Fair enough – I’m not one who downloads movies or rips them off friends, I’ve purchased originals of all my DVDs and BluRays.  The unfortunate thing is that the copy protection is so, ummm, “good”, that you have to jump through numerous hoops to get it working even when you’ve got all the legitimate discs!  FAIL!

Anyway, that’s my vent.  At the end of the day, it wasn’t just Sony that was responsible, but given their history, I think it’s safe to say that they held a large part of the sway in the development of the format and the “protection” and restrictions that go along with it.

…but back to my original point, I bought a Sony BWU-500S BluRay drive which has been faultless from the start, so all good on that front.

 

The Sound Card

I can’t even begin to tell you how much research I put into this.  But I’ll try anyway!

I read just about every review on every sound card that seemed suitable.  This included offerings from (the final choice) Asus, Auzentech, Creative and HT Omega Claro (the Halo XT).  I looked at all the specs, compared it with what I wanted and pretty much narrowed it down to the only choice for me – the Asus Xonar HDAV 1.3 Deluxe.  This card has swappable opamps so of course I had to spend a couple of weeks researching the best opamps going around.  I finally came across some produced by a company called Burson Audio out of Melbourne that seemed to fit the bill for the sound quality I was looking for.  The only trick was going to be fitting these large opamps into the cramped space on the card.

Pictured below is the card after installation of some Burson Audio opamps as well as some temporary Burr-Brown OPA627AP IC opamps in the daughter card.

The Mother Card! Can you spot the mod?	Here’s a hint – there used to be an EMI shield covering this entire card.
Anybody want an EMI shield? One owner, never used, great condition!
Here’s the daughter card with some minor mods applied.  The row of IC opamps just above the row of capacitors are Burr-Brown OPA627AP chips on single-channel to dual-channel adapters.  More mods to come for this one – just got to save up a little more cash!	Terrible pic, I know, but if you look really closely you can see the Mother Card at the top with the Burson opamps and the daughter card at the bottom left has now been partially modded with another Burson opamp in the buffer section for the centre/subwoofer output.

My final choice of sound card was based on compatibility with all the BluRay “standards”, quality out of the box, but with the capability to upgrade through some mods to the card.  That pretty much left the Asus and the HT Omega, although I couldn’t find anywhere that sold the HT Omega new, so that really only left the Asus.

I would have liked to have gone for the slightly higher-specced Asus Essence ST/STX, but the only one that enabled a connection to the daughter card for full 7.1 analogue output was the ST which was only available as a PCI card (and not PCIe).  And of course, I bought a motherboard that didn’t have any older PCI slots.  Gaaaaah! Asus, you fools!  Oh well, I’m sure there was a good reason for it, I’m just venting again…

 

Quick Impressions

Out of the box prior to any mods, I wasn’t that impressed with the card. All the reviews I read raved about the Asus being a true audiophile card, but unless audiophiles have lowered their standards recently, I didn’t hear it myself. Don’t get me wrong, the card is probably one of the highest quality PC sound cards you can buy, but I was hoping for more. The mid-range sounded a little “dead” – in particular the guitars on Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms”. They seemed to lose their “crunch” and tone and there seemed to be some artifacts being produced in the lower to mid-bass that weren’t all that pleasant.

Although, I must say that this sound balance worked pretty well for movies – it was already better to my ears than what I was previously getting through my Marantz SR5600 which is a pretty nice piece of equipment in its own right.  Everything seemed to have much more presence and involved you more in the movie.

I’ll leave it until my next post to discuss the complete detail of how this card sounded out of the box and how it sounds now with the Burson discrete opamps.  The short story is that with the Burson’s, this piece of kit is definitely what I would call “high-end” and nothing short of absolutely sensational.  Especially running through my Anthem PVA7 power amp and Paradigm Titan speakers.

 

Anyway, more on that later.

 

The Modding Process

Gotta say – it was a little tricky.  There’s not a lot of room between the 3 IC opamps on the Mother Card.  I originally purchased 3 Burson opamps with 8-pin DIP headers installed.  The front (buffer) section accepted that quite nicely, but left me questioning how on earth I was going to squeeze the other two in.

In my first (failed) attempt, I de-soldered the DIP headers from 2 of the opamps and tried to bend the remaining length in the leads so that they would fit.  I managed to fit one (just!) but I didn’t have enough length left in the leads to fit the other one.  Then I thought that they might fit nicely in the front sections of the daughter card (for the centre/subwoofer and L/R side surround outputs).  It was then that I discovered I had destroyed one of the opamps in my de-soldering attempts. D’OH!!!

So I bought 2 more to fit back into the Mother Card and this time I got them with 4cm leads that I could bend into just about any position I needed.  I didn’t want to stretch my already questionable soldering skills by trying to de-solder the DIP sockets and then re-solder the opamps directly to the board, so I just got lazy and plugged the leads directly into the corresponding points on each socket.  Works perfectly and the opamps are not moving so I’m not fussed.

 

Conclusion

So that was pretty much all the bits for the PC done.  Other than the work of installing all the software, everything was good to go.

For all the parts listed below, I had spent just under $2500 and got a piece of equipment that is way better than anything I’ve ever owned and as good as stuff that I’ve heard in Hi-Fi stores costing twice as much and more (just for the receiver/processor).  Am I stoked?  The answer to that is a very qualified and enthusiastic “Yes!”

 

The bits are:

• Silverstone GD01MX case
• Silverstone Strider Gold power supply
• Gigabyte GA-H67MA-D2H-B3 motherboard
• Intel i3-2100 CPU @ 3.1GHz
• 4GB Corsair DDR3 RAM module @ 1333MHz
• 2 x Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB drives
• Sony BWU-500S BluRay drive
• Asus Xonar HDAV 1.3 Deluxe sound card
• Burson Audio and Burr-Brown opamps for sound card mods
• Analogue audio cables + HDMI cable

 

Next up – I’ll give you my subjective review of the system (audio primarily, but video also).

Design Goals and Implementation – Part 2

 

OK, so now we get down to the nitty gritty of all the bits I actually bought and why.  I found a store online (www.techbuy.com.au) that sells pretty much any tech gear that you could possibly want (they even sell projector globes which will no doubt come in handy pretty soon).  I’ve found them to be really good – prompt delivery, always well-packaged and great prices.  The only slight niggle I had with them was when I sent my sound card back for a warranty repair.  They sent the card on to the manufacturer (Asus) for assessment, Asus sent it back with a “no issue found” response, at which point I would have hoped Techbuy would have contacted me to say “what do you want to do now?”.  Instead, they sent it straight back to me.  At the end of the day, I figured out myself what the issue was (Asus drivers) and Techbuy didn’t charge me anything extra, even though it was a “no issue” situation, so I can’t complain too much.

 

The Case

As mentioned previously, I wanted a case with plenty of room so that I could space out components, and also one that had a front panel display.  After a bit of research, I came across the Silverstone GD01MX:

This case has all the things I need, plus a remote control that’s like the standard Windows MCE remote on steroids (or maybe at least some serious protein supplements!)  Solid, well-built and with minimal resonance, we’re looking pretty good out of the blocks.

 

The Motherboard

This is the Gigabyte GA-H67MA-D2H-B3 if that means anything to anyone.  This was my first slight purchasing mistake (albeit only a potentially small one), in that I don’t think it supports HDMI 1.4 for 3D video transport.  I think I was too focussed on audio concerns, but still, it won’t cost too much to upgrade when I can finally get a 3D projector so I’m not too concerned.

 

The Power Supply

“Clean green power” as I’ve stated before.  The Silverstone Strider Gold that I chose is 80-Plus Gold certified which means that it supplies power to within +/- 3V which is actually very good.  Standard power supplies are +/- 5V or more.  It’s also quiet and super-efficient, plus it’s got modular cables so I can remove what I don’t need.

As you can hopefully see from the picture, it’s a 750W power supply.  This is significantly more than I will need so it will be kept well within it’s operating range and supply the cleanest power possible.

Below are pictures of these bits coming together.

And here’s my best attempt at getting a bit “arty” with the lighting and close up etc.:

 

The CPU and Memory

Pretty straight forward this one – an Intel Core i3-2100 running at 3.1GHz and with built-in Intel HD graphics running at between 900MHz and 1100MHz.  Low power consumption, doesn’t run too hot, all good.  You can see above the standard cooling fan – I had to pull my head in a little bit with my cooling ideas (see below)!

The memory is a single 4GB Corsair PC10600 @ 1333MHz DDR3 module.

 

The Storage

2 hard drives, low power consumption (5900RPM) set up as a RAID0 array (striped).  The drives themselves are Seagate Barracuda Green SATA-III models.  Each drive is 2TB (giving me 4TB of striped storage) – hopefully enough to hold all my CDs and selected DVDs and BluRays (if ever there becomes a legitimate way to do it, or if I just get the s#!ts completely with Sony and get SlySoft’s AnyDVD HD to rip everything to the hard drive).

Here is a picture of the drives in the bay.  Gettin’ a little bit cramped in there with all the cables, but it sorts itself out in the end.

 

Cooling

OK, now I have to admit a little something to you all.  It was at this point that I got a bit excited and got a head full of steam and thought that liquid cooling would be freaking awesome even though not really necessary and went ahead and bought a liquid cooling solution for the CPU, thus:

What I didn’t realise was how big this sucker was!  There was no way it was going to fit inside the case I’d chosen (I have no idea what kind of case you would need for this monster as I thought I already had a big case!  Oh well…)  I think if I’d needed a new radiator for my motorbike, this thing could have sufficed – that’s how big it was.  Still, I ended up selling it on eBay for not much less than what I paid for it, so no real harm done.

 

…Still to Come…

The sound card and the BluRay drive.  I want to go into a bit more detail on these, so I’ll leave this until the next post.

Design Goals and Implementation - Part 1

This is going to be a big one so I've split it up into a number of posts.  We'll start to delve into some detail relating to my goals for setting up my home theatre PC.

Below is a picture of what I'm trying to achieve.

So you can see from that that the PC will be doing most of the work including:

• DVD/Blu-Ray/CD player;
• Audio processor;
• Audio pre-amplifier;
• Video transport and partial image processor (the projector does the rest), and;
• Online/other media player.  For convenience, I want to rip all my CDs to the hard drive and be able to play them from there (WAV lossless format of course!).

Design Concepts

As stated in the first post, there are a number of concepts that I wanted to stick to with the design of this home theatre system.  These are detailed and expanded upon below.  Note that most of the initial design concepts were centred around integrating all the functionality into the HTPC; these have been merged into the one "Single Source" section below.


Single Source

The HTPC had to do it all.  Not out of necessity - just because I wanted to see if it could be done (plus I didn't want to be spending extra money on extra stuff taking up extra room when I could contain it all in the one box).  I know this probably goes against the audiophile angle of "separate components are always better", but the way I see it, all the HTPC components are separates (designed and built separately and by different companies) - they're just contained in the one box.  There are potential issues with this (particularly in regards to the audio), but more on this later.

For the HTPC to be doing all the work, I needed the following hardware and software components:

• Optical drive capable of playing Blu-Ray, DVD and CD.  I wouldn't mind being able to play DVD-A discs as well, but I haven't yet plucked up the courage to rock up to JB HiFi and ask "so where's your DVDA section?"  For those that have no idea what I'm talking about, that's probably for the best so we'll leave it at that!
• Audio card capable of high quality 7.1 channel analogue output.  Ideally, this would be capable of outputting a direct signal without trying to do any processing (i.e. upmixing, decompression effects etc.) on it.  Also, I have no intention of playing any PC games, so no need for the latest EAX processing.
• Software player for Blu-Ray/DVD/CD etc.  Windows Media Centre/Player can handle CD pretty well, can't handle Blu-Ray at all, and doesn't do any decoding other than Dolby Digital for DVDs.  I realise that there are 3rd-party decoders out there for DTS, but I'm not game to trust any of these as they seem pretty unofficial.
• Onboard graphics capable of HDMI output at full HD resolution (1920 x 1080).
• Enough storage to enable me to rip my music collection onto the hard drive and play it from there.  I'd also like to do this with my DVD and Blu-Ray collection, but at the moment there is no legitimate way to do this.  Token efforts have been made in the direction of "digital copy" features provided with discs, however these have not yet been widely adopted.

And of course all components to conform to the following standards:

• High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP).  If any component in the pipeline of components from the disc to the display and speakers is not HDCP-compliant, the Blu-Ray disc can enforce downsampled playback;
• Advanced Access Content System (AACS).  A digital rights management (DRM) system for Blu-Ray;
• Protected Audio Path (PAP).  This one is solely aimed at those wanting to play Blu-Ray content on PCs.  As I understand it, this one took a while to get right which annoyed a significant number of people.

Conformance to the above standards is a primary design goal, since (if I can pull it off), there's a possibility of making a commercial venture of building and selling HTPCs and I want to do it right.  Mind you, even trying to do it legitimately, I ran into some issues, but more on how I solved those later.

"Clean and Green" Power

This is mainly to keep the Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI) inside the case to a minimum so that it doesn't interfere with the production of the analogue audio.  A number of elements are required to attain this goal:

• All components to be minimal power consumption;
• Power supply not to be pushed to its limits so as to minimise power fluctuations;
• Tightest possible voltage regulation on the main power supply;
• No unnecessary components (eg. use onboard video instead of separate video card);
• Where possible, all high-current power cables to be routed around the outer edge of the inside of the case and not directly over or around the sound card;
• Large case to enable separation of components.  EMI falls off as the inverse of the square of the distance between components - meaning that even a little bit of extra space can make a big difference.

Play music without having to fire up the projector

This basically means getting a case with a display.  There are varying levels of displays available, I just wanted something simple that would show me information when I was scrolling through my music library relating to which album/artist I had currently selected etc.



So that's all my design goals in detail.  Next post, I promise I'll go into the components that I actually selected and the reasons why (and also highlight some mistakes/oversights that I made).

Stay tuned!

The Journey Begins...

Well, actually, the journey began a little while back.  This is the story of how and why it began.

It wasn't a dark, stormy night.  There was no assistant named Igor, and the special effects budget was limited to the occasional flickering of the lights due to the dodgy wiring in our old house.  This monster was going to have to be brought into being in an unconventional and totally un-movie like manner.  Oh well.

I think it might have been a Sunday afternoon around 2:30pm - baby number 2 wasn't quite born yet, and little fella number 1 was happily having his afternoon nap.  I had previously had the thought that I wouldn't mind being able to play blu-ray movies and I was browsing the internet to see what specs I needed for a PC that was capable of doing that.  The setup at the time went thusly:

• Marantz SR5600 AV Receiver (nice piece of mid-range kit);
• Pentium 4 2.6GHz Media PC with Asus Xonar D2/PM sound card providing S/PDIF audio to the Marantz;
• nVidia GeForce7 series card for the visuals fed directly to;
• InFocus IN76 1080i projector (nice!);
• Paradigm Titan front speakers and Jamo (can't remember the model number) centre, surrounds and sub.

I quickly discovered that the old P4 just wasn't going to cut it for blu-ray, so I started toying with some ideas for upgrading.  The first thing that occurred to me was whether I should forget about going the home theatre PC (HTPC) route and just get a nice processor/power amp combo with a capable player, as I had heard that setting up a HTPC, particularly for blu-ray, was "interesting" to put it politely.

I do so like a challenge, though, and there were other things that only a HTPC can provide, so I put the processor/power amp combo idea on the backburner.  The concepts I wanted to adhere to were:

• Central location for playing all media (music, DVDs, Blu-Rays, etc.);
• Minimise the number of components;
• A HTPC that was capable of acting as a pretty decent processor and pre-amp in itself, in addition to all the other functions that it can perform;
• Easily upgradeable without having to invest in expensive pieces of additional hardware;
• Audio-focussed - I like good quality audio so I needed all components to be selected around that.

So that's where the journey started.  Next blog, I'll go into bringing the concepts to life and selecting components.