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[JimH]

[Split from Synapse discussion:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=87884.0 ]

............

A good fan running slowly can be quiet.   jmone thought it was.

[AndyU]

A good fan running slowly can be quiet.   jmone thought it was.

Alas, quiet isn't silent. If the fan is audible in a quiet room it will be audible in quiet passages of music. No fan has ever got less noisy as it gets older. I listen to a lot of classical music, which can have a huge dynamic range and some very very quiet sounds, including silence. Fan noise would be an absolute deal-breaker. The Logitech Touch is silent. The Sonore mini server is silent, and not significantly different in price to the product you are proposing, though based on squeezebox software. Auralic have a fanless DLNA renderer in the pipeline, albeit at more than twice the price. I honestly don't think you can call it an audiophile products with a fan. DACs nowadays have 24 bits of resolution, and though few systems can deliver that dynamic range an audible fan will eat into it unnecessarily.

Here is Auralics press release about their proposed renderer - wireless, silent, some pretty impressive data rates.

[csimon]

One important point for me, although I don't know how "reasonable" this is in other peoples' eyes, is not just the silent issue but having no moving parts in a machine that is going to be on a lot of the time. There may be an "audiophile" angle from that, e.g. no clicks from disks, no EMI from electric motors etc, but I was coming at it from the angle of having nothing mechanical to break down!

[csimon]

The Sonore mini server is silent, and not significantly different in price to the product you are proposing, though based on squeezebox software.

I wasn't quite sure at first glance what this machine does. It's described as a server, so I assume from this it has a Squeeze server in it, but also can act as a DLNA renderer, albeit with no actual outputs apart from USB which means an external DAC or USB-to-SPDIF converter is required?

[JimH]

Alas, quiet isn't silent.

Silent isn't silent.  No room is completely silent.  Do you hold your breath when you listen?  Can you stop your heart?

Then I have a little tinnitus.

In my former career, selling wood burning stoves, we also sold 5 inch fans to hang in the corner of a doorway to move heat to other rooms.  They were quiet to the point that I would call them silent.  A good fan can be _very_ quiet. 

[AndyU]

Don't know enough about it, or about prices in the us, but shuttle do some reasonable fanless pcs designed for 24/7.

[AndyU]

Silent isn't silent.  No room is completely silent.  Do you hold your breath when you listen?  Can you stop your heart?

Then I have a little tinnitus.

I can't see why you need to be sarcastic. A fan would be a deal breaker for people like me who prefer to listen to music in as quiet an environment as possible. OK?

[JimH]

I'm sorry if you thought I was being sarcastic.  It's 100% true, from my point of view.  Fan does not mean noisy.

[JimH]

Two interesting tables:

A quiet country setting is 30db
http://www.industrialnoisecontrol.com/comparative-noise-examples.htm

A quiet 3" (80mm) fan is 25db:
http://www.sidewindercomputers.com/tecar.html

[AndyU]

Two interesting tables:

A quiet country setting is 30db
http://www.industrialnoisecontrol.com/comparative-noise-examples.htm

A quiet 3" (80mm) fan is 25db:
http://www.sidewindercomputers.com/tecar.html

A fan that you can hear is a fan that you can hear. Some noise plus some more noise is more noise. Don't want to hear a fan while I'm listening to a Beethoven Quartet.  Have gone from being an enthusiastic potential early adopter to absolutely not interested. Sorry!

[JimH]

Tomshardware thread:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/227663-29-noise-level

Someone there posted a list on which a theater with nobody talking was 30db.

CPU fans can be under 20db.

[JimH]

Don't want to hear a fan while I'm listening to a Beethoven Quartet. 

I don't think you could.  Even without the music. 

We won't offer a device that isn't quiet.

[mwillems]

Tomshardware thread:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/227663-29-noise-level

Someone there posted a list on which a theater with nobody talking was 30db.

CPU fans can be under 20db.

Fans can be inaudibly quiet.  A few months back, I posted about a cpu fan I'm using that independent testers rated at 12 dB, which was only slightly louder than the noisefloor of their anechoic chamber: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=85573.0

I've had light bulbs or solid state electronics that put out hum much louder than that.  

[AndyU]

Here is a perspective on the fan noise of the DN2820 from the intel forum. To quote:

The DN2820 is pretty quiet by my standards but it's not silent.  Also if you use a spinning hard drive that adds a little to it.  I've tried the i3s, the Celeron, and the DN2820 in my living room as HTPCs and all were totally acceptable.  The only time I heard anything from them was when the room was completely silent and even then only when I was within a few feet."

So, according to that guy the fan is audible from a few feet. It won't get quieter as it gets older or dirtier. If you push the processor - say decoding to DSD realtime - it'll likely get noisier.

To interest folk like me, your product has to be silent.

[cncb]

Then I have a little tinnitus.

Me too but I'm still very sensitive to extraneous noise.  A few years ago I built several small "HTPCs" to use around the house - all with SSD drives, pico PSUs, and the "T" version of the Intel core i3 processor.  So, the only moving part is the stock low-profile Intel CPU fan which I can't hear at all unless I put my ear right up to the case.  Unless one plans to sit an inch from the PC, you won't hear anything.  If the fan goes bad or gets louder over time, then you just pop in a new $20 "extra-quiet" aftermarket fan.

[Mr ChriZ]

One thing that has started bugging me more than fans is chargers.
Samsung phone/tablet chargers in particular often emit a really irritating high frequency noise.  No I'm not having a laugh - it actually really bugs me!
The frequency is high enough to make them hard to pin point and find out where they are.  It reminds me of having TV's on without any reception.  That always used to bug me for the same reason.

[bulldogger]

I can't see why you need to be sarcastic. A fan would be a deal breaker for people like me who prefer to listen to music in as quiet an environment as possible. OK?

Human breathing is about 10db. Most overlook this when they are discussing "silence." http://www.decibelcar.com/menugeneric/87.html No room is silent with a human in the room, even if you can achieve a very low measured level. To really even worry about very low noise level, you can must have a room that has had extensive sound proofing. In my last theater, the walls were composed of first fiberglass insulation, then a layer of mass loaded vinyl, layer of drywall, then Green Glue and a second 5/8 layer of drywall. It still wasn't silent unless I wanted to hold my breathe and turn off the AC  .

[BillT]

DACs nowadays have 24 bits of resolution, and though few systems can deliver that dynamic range an audible fan will eat into it unnecessarily.

ITYM no system can deliver that dynamic range, (by a long way).

In my former career, selling wood burning stoves,

My wood burning stove hisses quite loudly when it's in use, even though it doesn't have a fan. Presumably the air passing through the intake.

I'm afraid that I wouldn't buy such a device with a fan either. Although they can be very quiet they seem to have a tendency to generate noise at the frequencies where the ear is most sensitive. 20dB SPL noise centered on 2kHz is very audible
, 20dB SPL noise centred on 100 Hz will be inaudible.

Especially as it's not difficult to produce a PC that doesn't need a fan. (Mac mini for example.)

[AndyU]

Human breathing is about 10db. Most overlook this when they are discussing "silence." http://www.decibelcar.com/menugeneric/87.html No room is silent with a human in the room, even if you can achieve a very low measured level. To really even worry about very low noise level, you can must have a room that has had extensive sound proofing. ..

I have many recordings of chamber music, typically string quartets but also some larger works, where I can easily hear the soloists breathing. I am (usually) not holding my own breath, and my room isn't sound-proofed.

Not sure how this product will fit in with what's already available or imminent. A Raspberry Pi is an order of magnitude cheaper, fanless, and with a $30 hifiberry offers 24/192 audio. A shuttle pc is more money, but fanless and will do video. The Auralic Aries is a lot more, but drips with audiophile street-cred. There are  increasing numbers of network music players that make the whole streamer + USB DAC paradigm less attractive. If only JRiver worked with the Linn DS range!

[Scolex]

Andy
No offense but why are you so hung up on passive cooling when there are cooling options that are virtually inaudible.
So before you start playing Beethoven's Quartet do you turn off the HVAC system in your home so it doesn't disturb you,
it is louder than even a moderately quiet fan.
Do you realize just how quiet 20 or even 30db is?

[jmone]

I do get Andy's point even though I don't suffer it.  If you "know" there is a fan you can start to listen for it and at that point you are removed from the enjoyment of the event.  For me (in the early days of MC) it was wondering if I was decoding DTS-MA or just the core... I just had to check..or checking the madVR stats to see if I was dropping the occasional frame (even though I'm sure I would not have noticed the difference).  Thankfully single malt scotch seems to have solved the issue  

[AndyU]

Andy
No offense but why are you so hung up on passive cooling when there are cooling options that are virtually inaudible.
So before you start playing Beethoven's Quartet do you turn off the HVAC system in your home so it doesn't disturb you,
it is louder than even a moderately quiet fan.
Do you realize just how quiet 20 or even 30db is?

I don't need HVAC much, but in summer I certainly would switch it off before listening seriously. I do indeed realise how quiet 20dB or even 30dB is.  Do you realise how quiet sounds in classical music can be?  The silences themselves can be dramatic and are important; why intrude with a fan? And all fans get noisier with time. It's not as simple as adding up dBs ... the spectral distribution of the noise, and it's location in space are important too. It's incredible what small noises you can pick up if they aren't broadband and come from a different location in space to the instruments. The little 'tick' the disc drive in my old VAIO makes every minute or so is tiny, but clearly audible from across the room. If this proposed product is to merit the word "audiophile" in it's title, it needs to be silent imo. To say nothing of having galvanically isolated USB ports, probably with switchable 5V ... Ask on computeraudiophile - I'm pretty sure you'll get similar feedback to mine.

[JimH]

Thankfully single malt scotch seems to have solved the issue 

[dvogel1]

I puzzled over the fan/fanless options when I built my HTPC and concluded that modern, high quality fans are acceptable. It's worthwhile to consider the tradeoffs between low noise levels and the long term effects of heat on electronic components. Good fans, like the Noctua line, have excellent life expectances. They are also inaudible at low speeds from just several inches away. I have five (5!) low speed fans installed in my HTPC case and it is inaudible from a couple of feet away, with the top cover removed. The HTPC resides inside an open cabinet midway between my speakers (the usual setup) and it's well below ambient noise levels, i.e., absolutely inaudible from my listening position. The CPU temperature seldom rises above 35 C and the total fan power use is less than 5 W. What's the typical internal temperature of a compact, fanless PC?

I think the adage about trees falling in the forest applies. Is it silent if no one can hear it?

[JimH]

If only JRiver worked with the Linn DS range!

MC should work with Linn devices.  If not, please start a new thread.

[mwillems]

Good fans, like the Noctua line, have excellent life expectances. They are also inaudible at low speeds from just several inches away. I have five (5!) low speed fans installed in my HTPC case and it is inaudible from a couple of feet away, with the top cover removed.

Being able to do that kind of thing is one of the wonderful things about the logarithmic nature of volume scaling. I hadn't really thought that issue all the way through until I was doing my most recent HTPC upgrade.  Five hypothetical 15dB-fans are still significantly less loud than one 25dB-fan.  So the dominating strategy (if you need air cooling) seems to be to find the highest quality, lowest noise fan you can, and if it's too low flow for your cooling needs, just use a few  

[Scolex]

To each his own but I would like to sit down with some of those people and do A/B testing with my system switching my cooling profiles between silent, full, and auto (I only use auto).
Full tower, i5 3570K@4.4GHz, huge air cooler, 8 low speed fans (6 120mm case, 2 140mm CPU), case has sound deadening applied.
Silent uses 4 fans (2 in 2 out) at 500rpm, full is self explanatory, and auto is temperature based which is the same as silent until CPU >60°c or
GPU >70°c at which time it turns other fans on depending on circumstance and starts speeding them up as need be.
There isn't any music that is going to load the system enough to raise the CPU above 60 so it stays virtually inaudible.

[AndyU]

To each his own but I would like to sit down with some of those people and do A/B testing with my system switching my cooling profiles between silent, full, and auto (I only use auto).
Full tower, i5 3570K@4.4GHz, huge air cooler, 8 low speed fans (6 120mm case, 2 140mm CPU), case has sound deadening applied.
Silent uses 4 fans (2 in 2 out) at 500rpm, full is self explanatory, and auto is temperature based which is the same as silent until CPU >60°c or
GPU >70°c at which time it turns other fans on depending on circumstance and starts speeding them up as need be.
There isn't any music that is going to load the system enough to raise the CPU above 60 so it stays virtually inaudible.

You're talking about a completely different system to the NUC based one proposed. And you kinda make my point. Look at what you have had to do to get fan noise "virtually" inaudible. ("Virtual" is a great word btw. As in "my program's virtually working.") And even with eight fancy fans in a sound-deadened case, what happens when you push your machine and transcode PCM to DSD realtime? That loads the processor a fair bit. What happens if you do some intensive convolution or signal processing?

I based my scepticism on the quote from the user in the intel forum, who said the fan in the NUC DN2820 was inaudible from a few feet. He made no mention of listening in a sound-proofed room, or with HVAC turned off, or in the country, so the fan is clearly audible from some number of feet, which isn't good enough if you want an 'audiophile' solution. The NUC isn't a fancy device, the fan is unlikely to be of high quality; bearings degrade, get squeaky, fans get unbalanced, products vary in any case.

[cncb]

I'm curious what kind of amp are you using?  Is it "silent" in that it doesn't introduce any hiss or hum in your speakers at all?

[Mr ChriZ]

I'm curious what kind of amp are you using?  Is it "silent" in that it doesn't introduce any hiss or hum in your speakers at all?

If you're not listening to music very loudly this is quite easy to achieve even with a relatively cheap amp.

[drmimosa]

Discussion of fans split.

Although they can be very quiet they seem to have a tendency to generate noise at the frequencies where the ear is most sensitive. 20dB SPL noise centered on 2kHz is very audible
, 20dB SPL noise centred on 100 Hz will be inaudible.

I had a premonition that the fan noise from the NUC would cause some debate.  

There is a great comprehensive review website dedicated to PC noise issues, http://www.silentpcreview.com/.They tested the i3 version of the NUC a few years ago. It tested very well.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1315-page4.html

On the other hand, the reaction at computeraudiophile.com wasn't great:

I have it sitting on my desk and the noise was too bothersome so I unplugged it for now. It's definitely not silent.

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f10-music-servers/intel-next-unit-computing-music-server-14010-print/

One of their posters, DaQi, found a solution with an aftermarket case:

The NUC in the Akasa case is great. The case only gets a bit warm on use and of course is completely silent. I haven't done careful analysis but it seems to sure beat the old Acer Revo it replaced. Also running on windows 8.1 it is totally stable. I have had it running non-stop for a couple weeks now without having to reboot.

Highly recommended!

http://www.frozencpu.com/products/20883/cst-1424/Akasa_Newton_Fanless_Solid_Aluminum_NUC_Case_-_VESA_Mountable_AK-ITX07-BK.html?gclid=CJyqnOSvjb0CFTFk7Aod_lsAUQ

It's not very expensive, $89. Looks cool too! I could imagine it on the dashboard of Night Rider's car.

Could JRiver add this case to the Synapse, maybe price the device at 495? If silence is the problem the Silent Synapse is the solution.

Last I checked my synapses don't make any noise. Could be due to age, however.

Edit: Here's another one:  http://www.logicsupply.com/components/cases/fanless/ml300g/

[AndyU]

I'm curious what kind of amp are you using?  Is it "silent" in that it doesn't introduce any hiss or hum in your speakers at all?

I've a Benchmark DAC2 HGC driving a pair of ATC SCM25A Pro speakers. Each speaker has three power amps built in - 150W, 60W and 25W for the bass, mid-range and treble units respectively. You need to get your ear right up against the tweeter to hear any system noise at full gain. At which gain you would probably lose your ear if you played anything  - they are rated to 109dB continuous at 1m.

You're still completely missing the point though. Extraneous noise is intrusive when the music is quiet, or silent, not when it's loud. And noise from a completely different direction to the speakers is more noticeable than noise from the speakers themselves, especially as fan-noise is quite different in character to the pinky-white-noise you get from electronics. If you don't listen to classical music, or acoustic music with a wide dynamic range, I can understand how you might not understand this. And as the previous post points out, you might not be listening that loud either.

[mwillems]

For everyone's reference, here's another set of noise measurements on two models of NUC from a respected quiet PC review site (silentpcreview).  The reviews are of one of the older i3 NUCs (mentioned by Dr. Mimosa above), and one of the newer Haswell i5 NUCs. They're not the exact NUC under discussion, but my understanding is that all the fan-cooled NUCs use a similar cooling rig (certainly these two appear to use the same rig).  If the cooling setup on the below reviewed NUCs is different from the one to be used in the Synapse, the i3/i5 cooling rig is likely to be noisier than the one for the Synapse NUC, so these measurements can be viewed as a likely "ceiling" for potential NUC noise with the stock cooler.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1373-page3.html
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1315-page4.html

As you can see, both are well below 20dB from two feet away, even doing video encoding (which is one of the higher processor load real world activities).  If you run torture test benchmarks (which do not simulate any real world processor load) it starts putting out between 23 and 30dB from that same two feet.  That means that from eight feet away, even with torture test type benchmarks running, you're probably talking about a maximum of 24dB, which would be completely inaudible in my house at any time of day (my lowest measured noisefloor is in the high 20's in the dead of night, usually more like mid 30's).

With almost any real world processor load, you're probably talking about inaudible from more than a foot or two away in any home that doesn't have serious room treatments.  The fan might get louder over time, but regular cleaning helps a lot in that regard.

[cncb]

You're still completely missing the point though. Extraneous noise is intrusive when the music is quiet, or silent, not when it's loud. And noise from a completely different direction to the speakers is more noticeable than noise from the speakers themselves, especially as fan-noise is quite different in character to the pinky-white-noise you get from electronics. If you don't listen to classical music, or acoustic music with a wide dynamic range, I can understand how you might not understand this.

That's what I was talking about: you have your classical music cranked so you can hear the very quiet parts clearly.  You wouldn't hear the background amp noise (e.g. hiss) during the loud passages but you might when it gets to the very quiet passages (since the background noise is related to the gain on the amp not the volume of the music).  In any case, I haven't had any "reference" amps but I can't imagine it not introducing any noise at all.

I'm curious why you would base your opinion on what "one guy in the Intel forum said" like it is the absolute truth.  I'm a guy in a different forum telling you that I'm sitting 2 feet away from one of the PCs I described earlier and I can't hear the fan at all.  How close do you plan on sitting next to the PC?

[AndyU]

With the torture test loads, Prime95 and Furmark, the fan noise jumped in both volume and pitch. At full tilt, it emits a hissy and whiny noise. But with normal loads, including a long sequence of video encoding, the noise always remained very low

Mounted on the back of a monitor, the SPL did not drop by more than a decibel, but the overall perception of higher frequency noise dropped so that the subjective impression was of a softer overall sound.

hmmm... I'd still rather pay more for a fanless solution. Or much less for a (still fanless) Raspberry Pi/Squeezebox Touch type solution. Fans always get noisier - is there any data about performance after a year of use?

[mwillems]

hmmm... I'd still rather pay more for a fanless solution. Or much less for a (still fanless) Raspberry Pi/Squeezebox Touch type solution. Fans always get noisier - is there any data about performance after a year of use?

The i3 unit has only been out for about 14 or 15 months, and the Haswells just dropped a few months ago, so I'm not aware of any "1-year later" type reviews (given that the older of the two NUCs has only been out for a little more than a year).

The part of the review that seemed most persuasive to me was "In normal use, you can't hear the fan until your ear is inches from the unit." Those guys are tough to please, so that's high praise from them.

[AndyU]

I'm curious why you would base your opinion on what "one guy in the Intel forum said" like it is the absolute truth.

My initial opinion was formed from JimH of this forum who said the fan was merely quiet, and as moreover he has tinnitus I reasonably deduced that the fan was audible, which makes it a non-starter for me.

[JimH]

My hearing is very good.  The tinnitus is minimal.

[AndyU]

Looks like DrMimosa found a few other noise reviews over here, with different results: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=87884.msg603294#msg603294

Seems a reasonable range of results - this is a product made down to a price, so there are bound to be issues with product variation and aging to cope with. But if you're going to call it an audiophile product then you have to be absolutely sure you satisfy that class of user - safest way to do it is no fan. "Virtually silent" doesn't cut it. The Logitech Touch manages! I can 24/192 out of mine, s/pdif or USB .. and feed it from MC.

[JimH]

drmimosa's post is above

[jmone]

I have the NUC 2820 and an SPL Meter.  If you want I can measure how loud it is (or is not).  Let me know the test parameters you want.

[AndyU]

I have the NUC 2820 and an SPL Meter.  If you want I can measure how loud it is (or is not).  Let me know the test parameters you want.

For me a reasonable test would be to see how far away you can hear it from in a quiet room while MC is doing something reasonably heavy like transcoding PCM to DSD realtime. Maybe some convolution too. Let it run for a while before you judge so that heat has a chance to build up and get the fan going. Measuring objectively is harder to do usefully - you probably need to measure the spectrum of the noise, not just an SPL type overall level.

[JimH]

Great.  Measure at 6 feet away? And with the NUC off.  Thanks.

[fitbrit]

For me a reasonable test would be to see how far away you can hear it from in a quiet room while MC is doing something reasonably heavy like transcoding PCM to DSD realtime. Maybe some convolution too. Let it run for a while before you judge so that heat has a chance to build up and get the fan going. Measuring objectively is harder to do usefully - you probably need to measure the spectrum of the noise, not just an SPL type overall level.

Preferably about 18 months.

[jmone]

No Probs - Will have to do tonight my time and I'll post back.

[AndyU]

fwiw, I measure my ambient noise level at 27db A weighted, using the iAudioTool iPad app - which may well be rubbish. It's 10:30 at night, no traffic, nothing on in the apartment. Nice time to listen to some music.

[JJJ]

Why do you need / want a fan in the first place?

[bulldogger]

. A shuttle pc is more money, but fanless and will do video.

Will do video I guess is relative. I don't think you can "really" do video with a fanless pc. The passive GPU and IGPU are really "weak". You might as well just get an Oppo if that is what one is going to use. The Oppo will have a much better picture than any fanless pc. And make sure to "hold your breathe."

[Hendrik]

I wouldn't go that far. You can get decent video out of a NUC. It cannot run at the max settings of RO HQ, but it can still run medium to high quality, which is already a  great improvement over RO Std and easily on-par with standalone devices.

[akira54]

Like Andy I am sceptical about noise specs. Home theatre projectors are often described as quiet or very quiet at 30-35 dB, but I find that loud when listening to classical music. Even my present projector which clocks in, I believe, at 26 dB is too loud for quiet listening, so I either switch to a computer monitor or switch all displays off.

The MacMini is decidedly NOT fanless ... unfortunately. It serves as my media server and I normally do not hear the fan but every now and then when the load is heavy it does come on and then it can be quite loud.

PS. Isn't the Benchmark DAC superb!?