With the Fusion AmpDac available I moved to the next phase of the project: getting the EB1501 to output a bit perfect 24bit 192khz data stream.

First I installed the Cleo drivers with plays ASIO natively. All went fine. Plugged the computer USB into the Fusion AmpDac USB and Windows 7 immediately installed the necessary drivers. Reboot and everything recognized and ready to play.

Having read about the excruciating levels of tweeking needed to get a computer music server to perform optimally as a music source I opted to use Windows 7 Home Premium which includes Windows Media Center. The word on the street is that WMC can do bit perfect playback by setting the media player to exclusive mode which engages WASAPI. And there is a plugin to allow FLAC files to play. My wife Flora has been 'in training' getting comfortable using the WMC to play Poirot movies, some voice recordings and assorted music. She quickly grew fond of the interface and found it quite intuitive.

Well WMC doesn't support WASAPI at all! And the FLAC plugin is rather untidy too. If anyone has found a way to make these work I'd appreciate knowing. I then hoped we could salvage the plan to use WMC by resorting to an ASIO plugin to bypass the W7 playback system but that doesn't work either. It seems to load the system with too much overhead.

So I installed Album Player. This is a very simple but intuitive music control package and the interface looks quite good. It has ASIO support built in, just needs to be selected in the control panel. This turned out to be be an easy way to get up and running with ASIO and bit perfect playback. Flora also finds it to be user friendly and has no problem selecting and playing music. So for now we'll run with this. There is a plugin to use MCE remotes and some options to configure it in the Album Player settings page. The interface is as shown in the picture and other 'skins' and visualization options are available.

The next step is to reduce operating system overhead and especially processes which 'poll' in the background, thus loading down the CPU and causing dropouts. I uninstalled a ton of bloatware which helped lighten things considerably. We will shortly document step by step the other processes which need to be stopped or reconfigured.

I think a key issue is to choose the correct computer. The Wind Neton with touchscreen works very well but needed lots of reworking to get it into that state. However the Asus EB1501 is much easier to achieve bit perfect playback. It comes with the Nvidia Ion graphics card which has its own powerful onboard GPU so it can provide good looking graphics without loading down the CPU. Also it has a dual core CPU (really quad core as it emulates a 3rd and 4th CPU. This allows the CPU to 'throttle down' as needed and yet kick out some pretty good cpu power when needed. The computer doesn't feel laggy at all and it boots up very quickly. So the fan is hardly every heard and can be software controlled.

Proof of this is the latency or resources used at idle. Even without extreme tweeking, it ideals along at between 1 to 5%.

And just look at the size! Not much bigger than a 1TB hard drive. It also has an HDMI output which allows direct connection to you flatscreen with assurance of good video and high quality audio from other sources. It comes with a DVD burner, 2gb memory and 300+gb hard drive. In the package there a very nice wireless keyboard, remote and mouse.

OK we're almost there.