# Fun music (and HT) system...



## Ikarius (Nov 22, 2011)

So, this system build goes into a lot of detail on functionality- because a very important aspect of this is *how* it works.

*Equipment*
AVR: Marantz NR1402
L/R Speakers: MartinLogan Motion LX-16
Center Channel: MartinLogan ElectroMotion C2
Surround Speakers: MartinLogan Motion FX
Subwoofer: PSA XS-15 
TV: Sony KDS-R60XBS2
Sources: Sony PS3, Apple Airport Express
Tablet: Google Nexus 7

*Software*
Windows PC
JRiver Media Center
JRiver Gizmo
Airfoil by Rogue Amoeba 
EAC, Tag&Rename (for ripping/tagging)

*Pictures*
Front shot of system









Rear Speaker


Subwoofer



Front Speaker


Center Speaker


Tablet music interface



*Details*
All MartinLogan speakers w/ their HVFR tweeters- these speakers sound very good to me- beautiful high-end detail, slightly warm midrange, and not too bright/forward. The 5.25" drivers are identical across all speakers, and the L/R & Surround speakers have identical tweeters, only the tweeter in the center is larger than the others. I was very careful to match these speakers up, and the results are tremendous. The room is 18'x14.5', and far from ideal, but having run Audessey and then tweaked the settings a little, I can sit on the couch and listen with the receiver set to "multi-channel stereo", and hear ONE sound thats immediately around me. It's addictive. If I were going for a pure stereo listening experience, I'd be seriously looking at the MartinLogan Motion 40 tower speakers; the LX-16's are good, but not quite good enough I'd ask them to stand on their own for a full music experience. And yes, I'm driving all these speakers with a measly 50 watts/channel slim AV receiver. They get PLENTY loud, with no signs of clipping or other evidence they want more juice. 

The subwoofer- Wow. Just, wow. This beast of a subwoofer from PSA is insane; watching inception on blu-ray is quite the experience with this beast holding up the bottom end. I originally had an 8" sub which really really tried, but couldn't manage dealing with the LFE content on modern movies. I went and listened to some MartinLogan dynamos subs, some velodynes, and a few others, and all of them felt like they got "muddy" when asked to handle busy action scenes with deep bass. The PSA is the cleanest I've heard for that content, and it sounds wonderful with musical content as well. Fast, tight, precise, and plenty of impact.

The music side of things. I wanted an all-digital music collection, but I didn't want to sacrifice quality. The digital collection resides on a windows PC in a different room from the sound system, and I wanted to be able to ship the sound wirelessly from the PC to the sound system, and I wanted to do that in digital form, so's to use the DACs in the AVR, rather than in the computer. After a lot of searching, the Apple Airport Express was the only answer I could come up with. Once I associated it with my wireless network, it became an airplay destination, and I was able to use a 3.5mm->TOSlink cable to go into the AVR. Airfoil allows me to redirect the sound from any windows application to any airplay destination, so between the two of those, I had my wireless digital transport. One note on a downside of this solution- the Airport Express only supports 16/44 bitrate. If you've got DVD-A, SACD, or other higher bitrate stuff, this won't stream that as-is. I've heard that the airport will automatically downsample it, but haven't tried that. After looking around, I found JRiver Media Center, which is a very full-featured replacement for Windows Media Center. JRiver fully supports FLAC and other formats, as well as having put in effort to be "audiophile friendly"- they've worked to ensure that it doesn't mangle the sound. I've migrated my entire digital music collection to FLAC format, so no lossy formats are being used. The final piece of this comes for free with JRiver media center. They wrote a free android application called "gizmo", which can remotely control what's playing. So now, I can sit in the room with the sound system, browse my music library on a tablet, and control what's playing- Perfection! Just the other weekend, we had friends over, and we ended up in the living room, listening to tunes, and passing the tablet around the room, everyone taking turns picking things to play. It was an awesome time, and being able to share like that really makes the whole thing worth it!

For the HT side of things, I've found the PS3 pretty much does all I need. DVDs, Blu-rays, Netflix, Amazon VOD, and for any movies I've got on my computer, I can stream to the PS3 via PS3mediaserver. I'm a SageTV refugee, and I'm studying a better way to manage my digital video collection, hopefully with full metadata and such. I'm contemplating a Roku XS w/ Plex as a possibility. As far as quality goes, it doesn't get a lot better. The sound is phenomenal, and I think this system manages to meet or exceed the experience of going to the movie theater.

Total $$ investment in building this system- ~$5.5k. That includes all the audio gear, software, the TV, the PS3, and the Tablet. IMO this goes to show you don't need to spend an incredible amount of money to assemble a pretty terrific system.

I'm happy to answer any questions!

Cheers
Ikarius


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