Some of you may know that back in Feb of this year I started a mini-project to see if I could replace a pre-pro with a home theater PC.
The experiment has been a resounding success. I've been using the PC in our demo room for around three months now with no hickups, crashes or anything that would make me worry about recommending it as a solid solution. The quality is good enough that it has replaced my other music server (Mac Mini, iTunes, Pure Music) and so now I am using one server for both music and movies. It's really nice to be able to rip blu-rays to a server and be able to choose scenes as needed and skip all the introductory screens. A poor man's Kaleidescape.
The downside is the large amount of configuration that needs to be done to get everything to work. Thankfully I've figured all of this out and documented it in a blog post on my website: how to replace your home theater pre-processor with a HTPC!
Take a look and leave a comment either here or there!
Next up I am going to start looking at what benefits, if any, these new fangled full range room correction plugins like Dirac Live and Audiolense can offer. I am personally not convinced theoretically about full range room correction but given the level of interest in it generally I figure I should at least try these things out, do some measurements and report back my findings.
The experiment has been a resounding success. I've been using the PC in our demo room for around three months now with no hickups, crashes or anything that would make me worry about recommending it as a solid solution. The quality is good enough that it has replaced my other music server (Mac Mini, iTunes, Pure Music) and so now I am using one server for both music and movies. It's really nice to be able to rip blu-rays to a server and be able to choose scenes as needed and skip all the introductory screens. A poor man's Kaleidescape.
The downside is the large amount of configuration that needs to be done to get everything to work. Thankfully I've figured all of this out and documented it in a blog post on my website: how to replace your home theater pre-processor with a HTPC!
Take a look and leave a comment either here or there!
Next up I am going to start looking at what benefits, if any, these new fangled full range room correction plugins like Dirac Live and Audiolense can offer. I am personally not convinced theoretically about full range room correction but given the level of interest in it generally I figure I should at least try these things out, do some measurements and report back my findings.