Music Center Project

This has been kicking around in my head since i found three discarded Profusion/X music center devices. They ran a customized version of Red Hat and connected to a licensed music server to stream audio to stores in a mall. Gave one away but kept two to play with.



Obviously, the license had expired but the audio form factor of the case intrigued me and upon opening it up i found a Via mini-ITX board with a C3 533mhz processor, 128 mb of DDR ram and a 40 mb hard drive. May not seem promising but that board packs a lot of tech into a small space, there are 2 DDR ram slots, two USB 2.0 ports, 10/100 ethernet, onboard vga video, PS/2 for keyboard and mouse and 3 pci slots plus a front panel DVD drive. Not too shabby.



After rummaging around in the parts cabinet i came up with two 512mb DDR 400 sticks, a 200 gig IDE hard drive, a pci angle bracket and a ATI rage pro pci video card and a Packard Bell Fast Media remote plus the Cambridge Audio 2.1 speaker set. Unfortunately the pci angle card was not quite the right form factor but i was able to find one on eBay for $5. So for now we upgraded the ram and the hard drive and replaced the stock optical with a combo drive. Not that we will be burning cd's on this unit but it helps to be flexible. When the angle card arrives we can upgrade from the onboard video.

The system booted fine and we went to the BIOS to change the settings. First we assign 64mb to the onboard video, optimize the BIOS and do an 8X overclock of the C3 cpu resulting in a whopping 1Ghz of speed (while you can go above 8x the board locked up at boot). The board's BIOS is a wonder of flexibility with lots of settings. So now we have a 1gig pc with P3 performance - what to install?

We used to run XBMC on a revo so it was a first choice. Unfortunately the live CD does not run on such old hardware, in fact all the media distros we tried failed to initialize the x-windows GUI or failed to boot. Many are optimized for i686 and won't run on an i386 clone cpu. So we tried Microsoft Windows XP pro which did install but failed to install drivers for the network (which is realtek chip), the audio etc. It ran but slowly and hunting down XP drivers on the internet is always a frustrating experience. What about an older version of Ubuntu? So we haul out the 9.04 desktop 32 bit cd and it boots and installs perfectly. Video is not bad, internet works and so does the audio and USB. We remove some of the uneeded services and apps and get a reasonable performance, hey to even runs the GIMP and OO at 2002 speed. You could even use this as a desktop in a pinch, except no flash in the web browser.

The only problem here is that just about any media software won't run on the C3 cpu. The included movie player and the included rhythmbox audio player works but xbmc and vlc won't install. However, we set rhythmbox to run automatically at boot and have in inhale 3 gig of FLAC audio files from the network.

Next we attach the speakers and put it in shuffle mode. How does it sound? - Excellent as a near-field sound system in a small room. Quite pleasurable while working. It's like listening to 70's FM radio. In fact I am using this with singles from 70's/80's and who knew Alice Cooper, ELO, Deep Purple, et al could sound good? I should hook up the Roland monitors to test and then the Spherex 5.1 system to compare.

The suprising thing about audio is that you never know what might sound good for certain applications. I recently hooked up a pair on 1969 Dynaco A-25 speakers to a 20 watt amplifier and fed it from a original Sony walkman cassette. This is certainly not an 'audiophile grade' system but it sounded quite good. In fact i ended up listening to it all week, trying out different kinds of music and inputs. The conclusion was this system sounded best when fed early 80's and 90's funk from analog sources (not CD's!). Gap Band, Dee-Lite, Morris Day, etc all sounded very good in a small room at middle field distance.

Time for some lunch...

Upgrades:

• better video using a fast pci video card
• customize LIRC to use the packard bell remote
  
• replace default unbuntu window manager with a lighter one
  
• wireless
• replace current board with a modern mini-ITX or mini-ATX board?