3beez Wax Music Management System

When a music lover of the audiophile persuasion decides to take the plunge into computer audio and organize a large collection of recordings, he chooses one of two basic approaches. The first is the “roll-your-own” method: Dedicate a computer (or part of one) to storing music files and get ripping/tagging/playback software such as JRiver, Media Monkey, MusiCHI, Foobar, MusicBee, or a host of others. This is clearly the economical course, even if the music lover decides to get a brand-new music-only computer. But there are hidden expenses and potential complications. Assuming that he’ll be employing lossless formats and that there are a sizable number of high-resolution downloads in his collection, he’ll probably need to purchase supplemental storage.

And he won’t want to use the stock sound card in his new computer for D-to-A conversion. An audiophile-grade sound card or, more likely, a USB DAC or some other conduit to his processor’s converters will give superior sonic results.

The other tack is to buy a music server, a traditional audio component that packages hardware and software in one box. Theoretically, this method will be less trouble for the poor soul who just wants to listen to music rather than hone his IT skills. Olive, Meridian, Sonore—you know the names.

The 3beez Wax Music Management System represents the second approach, and it’s worthy of close consideration by anyone at all anxious about the leap into the breach. 3beez (as in the three B’s—Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms) is the current project of electronics industry veteran Jeffrey Barish. Barish is an MIT-trained electrical engineer who also had success as an architectural acoustician. His first job was at Fairchild Semiconductor designing integrated-circuit preamps and power amps; he also worked at Sound Technology, famous for a widely used distortion analyzer. Before 3beez, he founded and led another start-up, EuPhonics, that specialized in applications of computer technology to audio and electronic music. Barish comes by his audio design skills honestly: His father started NAD.

Jeffrey Barish is a record collector with broad interests who had been considering a music organization system even before the introduction of Apple’s epochal platform. “To the best of my knowledge, iTunes didn’t exist when I began thinking about this,” Barish told me. “Because of my computer background, I started planning a ‘home project’ that would realize the vision I had for a system that I, myself, wanted. It took some time before I was able to start working on it and by that time, iTunes did exist, though I made a conscious decision to ignore it. I wanted to come up with something that was ideal for my needs and I didn’t want to be prejudiced by what others had done. As the system developed, I began to show it to friends, all of whom reacted along the lines of ‘I want one for my own system!’ So I started thinking about the possibly of commercial application.”

A distinction should be made between Wax, which is Barish’s proprietary music-organizing software and the Wax Box, which is the commercial product in which that software is available. Together, they comprise the Wax Music Management System. You cannot purchase the Wax software “engine” separately. “It’s conceivable that someday I’ll have a software-only product, but I don’t have it today largely because of issues of support. 3beez is not a large enough company to support a software-only product. Another reason is that my thinking in developing this product was that I wanted to offer something that was as close to turnkey as possible. That is, a user should be able to take the product out of the box, connect it easily to an audio system, and use it. There is no software to install or additional components to connect. There aren’t any more purchase decisions to make.”

The Wax Box is a compact component, built into a standard computer enclosure measuring 13.4″ x 12.6″ x 2.7″. The case is so loaded to the gills there isn’t room for a pair of standard RCA outputs, and you’ll need a 3.5mm mini-plug-to-RCA cable if you want analog output from the Wax Box. The device’s CPU does generate heat and to avoid the need for a cooling fan and the noise issues that would entail, Barish employs passive cooling. His product has the expected fins on its enclosure but also a series of six copper pipes that transfer heat from the CPU’s environment to the outside world. The DACs installed in the Wax Box are Realtek ALC892s. While they do support sample rates up to 192kHz, Barish freely admits that they don’t provide “audiophile-level performance”—and wonders if that goal is actually realistic in a server. “Putting a DAC inside a box that is essentially a computer makes it difficult to provide good sound quality because there is a lot of electrical noise. You really want to have the DACs in a separate box. It’s an argument that I don’t want to have, so I’ve provided options. If you’re happy with the sound, great. Just use the analog output. If not, connect a USB DAC.” Which is what I did, more or less. I connected the Wax Box from one of its six USB outputs via a Halide Bridge to my Anthem Statement D2v processor to employ the better DACs in that excellent component.

Underneath the optical drive—the Wax Box slot loads from the front—are two 1TB hard disk drives (HDDs) and a single solid-state drive (SSD). Barish needed to use 2.5″ drives instead of the more common 3.5″ size because of the enclosure’s smallish dimensions, but there were other concerns as well. “I was sensitive to issues of noise because this is a product that’s going to live in a user’s listening room,” he told me. “I didn’t want to have the sound of a mechanical device interfere with the enjoyment of music. The first thing I did to address that issue was to choose 2.5″ drives. They have less mass and they tend to be a little quieter than 3.5″ drives.

They’re carefully mounted in a box with a solid base using mechanical isolation to prevent the transmission of mechanical noise.” The operating system is on the solid-state drive. “I included the SSD for two reasons,” Barish said. “One is that it allows Wax Box to start up and stop more quickly so that it acts more like a standard audio product. The other reason is that it permits completely silent operation when playing. Wax, when you make a request for a recording, checks first to see if that recording is available in a cache on the SSD.

If it’s not there, it turns on the HDD with the sound archive long enough to transfer all of the files it needs off of it and store them in the cache on the SSD. It then turns off the HDD—it idles it. To any substantial degree, the only time you use the hard disk drive is when you’re ripping and tagging. Otherwise, it’s all SSD.”

Barish uses 1TB hard drives because, as of this time, that’s the largest capacity available in the 2.5″ size. This will be changing (if it hasn’t already), and Barish promises to use the highest-capacity 2.5″ HDDs he can. The two HDDs hold identical data: Wax Box automatically backs up your music files once a day. “I decided to build the backup capability into the Wax Box because many people are negligent when it comes to backups. I think almost everybody knows that you’re supposed to do backups but my experience is that many people never get around to it. My fear was we might have a situation where somebody invests a tremendous amount of time ripping an entire collection and carefully entering all the metadata desired and then, because of a disk crash—over which I have no control—he loses everything. I highly recommend that you create additional backups, especially if you’re so conscientious that you move your backups off-site. If your house burns down, you still have the data.” Likewise, Barish is also watching out for you when it comes to software updates. If you leave your Wax Box on at night, they will occur automatically between midnight and 3 AM.

There are two ways for a user to operate the Wax system. Option 1—“Direct Control”—is simpler. After establishing an Ethernet connection for the Wax Box, you plug a monitor into either the DVI-D, D-Sub, or HDMI ports on the back of the unit and a keyboard and mouse into two of the USB ports. You could use this method permanently but most users will configure Option 2 to allow remote control from the listening position using a tablet, smart phone, or desktop system. The excellent 55-page user’s manual (included in the Wax software—print it out and put it in a binder) explains clearly how to set up a “remote desktop viewer” with pretty much any device (an iPad and Android or Windows-based tablets, for examples.) Viewer applications—there are quite a few—range in cost from free (the Real VNC Viewer for Windows) to $30 or so.

The heart and soul of the Wax Music Management System is the Wax software. How smoothly it works with all kinds of music is what makes Wax Box worth the $5000 asking price (which is actually right in the middle of the pack for this kind of product.)

Wax is based on the Linux operating system, both for economic reasons—no licensing fees—and because it’s open-source software, which allowed the designer to “dive into the source code” when necessary. Barish carefully examined the way he interacted with physical media to devise a platform that’s exceptionally intuitive to use. This is apparent the very first time you turn the thing on and encounter the uncluttered Graphical User Interface (GUI).

The central organizing principle for Wax is musical genre. In the left upper corner of the GUI, the user is presented with a list of options: Anthology, Chamber, Comedy, Film, Jazz, Opera, Pop, and so on. You can add your own genres. Some have sub-genres. For “Symphonic,” you can parse the recordings as Baroque, Classical, Romantic, etc; for Pop, choices include Blues, Country, Electronic, New Age, Rock, and so on. Once you’ve clicked on a genre (or sub-genre), a list of recordings already in your library appears. For each genre, the identifying information—the “primary metadata”—is a little different. So, for “Symphonic,” the recordings are described by three columns—composer, work, and conductor. For “Show,” it’s the musical, composer, librettist, and date (of the production). In a large collection, you might have a dozen versions of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. Wax’s presentation lets you quickly know what your options are and choose the version you want to hear.

Also prominently located on the GUI is a button labeled Mode. Clicking on Mode reveals four choices that direct you to everything Wax can do. Select lets you choose what you’re going to listen to from the music files in your library. Play presents all of the metadata for the recording you’ve selected, including cover art. The Edit mode is used to add recordings or to modify the metadata of a recording already in the library and Config lets one engage various housekeeping functions—which codec to use when you rip, the status of updates, and many, many more options for advanced tweaking of the software’s functionality.

It’s in the Edit mode that the critical tagging process occurs. I’ll emphasize Wax’s performance with classical recordings because it’s this material that presents the biggest challenge to music-organizing software, the area where the ID3 standard employed by iTunes fails most miserably. Several aspects are worth mentioning. First, entering the “work metadata”—the most basic identifying information about each recording—is facilitated because the prompts to complete blank fields differ from genre to genre. So, for “Symphonic,” you’re asked for the composer, work, and conductor as opposed to “Jazz,” where the requests are for “ensemble” and “title.” Additional work metadata fields can easily be added on the fly (Barish refers to this as “infinite metadata”) as you are processing a disc or download. Second, Barish has thought long and hard about where Wax should go on-line for information, choosing MusicBrainz as his primary source of metadata. The MusicBrainz database is curated, meaning that an editor has viewed the metadata submitted by a user and declared it reliable. Additionally, MusicBrainz has established standards for the manner in which the metadata is presented, which makes it possible for Wax to extract information about a recording—say, the conductor— and put it in the right place. FreeDB is Wax’s backup source for metadata—there’s information on a larger number of recordings, though that information is more likely to be inaccurate.

Third, Wax has a clever way of organizing the “track metadata”— the designations of the individual movements of a string quartet or the titles of the arias on an opera recording, for example. Say a recording of Puccini’s La Bohème has 40 tracks. You can highlight the 12 tracks of the First Act, hit the “Group” button that appears, and watch the 12 tracks collapse into a single line that can then be labeled “Act I.” The same is then done for the eight tracks of Act II, the ten of Act III, and the ten of Act IV. Each act opens automatically to show the track metadata when you actually listen to the recording but, in the meantime, you don’t get a screen of track listings when you’re deciding what to play.

Barish recognizes that a collection is often best-served by taking a “work orientation” to cataloging classical music, as opposed to an “album orientation.” If a CD holds both Beethoven’s Fifth and Eighth Symphonies, you’ll want separate entries under “Beethoven” for each work. Working in the Edit mode, it’s a snap to specify “New Entry” for the two works as you’re cataloging them.

The workflow when ripping and tagging is very efficient. A CD is placed in the Wax Box’s front slot and the user hits the on-screen “Find CD” button. You decide which tracks to rip (all of them, usually) and click Rip and the four-to-five-minute ripping process begins. With ripping underway, you then turn to producing the desired tags and specifying the cover art from the choices Wax finds on-line. Before long, you’re completing the tags before the CD rip has finished. Very satisfying. In the Edit mode, Wax has you choose between “CD” and “File,” in terms of what you’ll be adding to the library. If it’s the latter, Wax helps you to navigate to wherever it is on your computer that you keep your downloads. Processing multi-disc sets is especially slick. Whether it’s a 4-CD recording of Parsifal or a 12-disc Grateful Dead box, as one disc finishes ripping, you simply click “Add Tracks” and Wax knows that the next CD coming belongs with the previous one(s). Happily, Wax provides “gapless” playback, controlled on a track-by-track basis, so playback of The Rite of Spring or Sgt. Pepper doesn’t result in pauses between tracks.

Sonically, Barish has made design choices with two constituencies in mind—the record collector who doesn’t value sound quality to an obsessive degree and, well, those of us who do. Barish declares that he, himself, is no Golden Ear and rips his own CDs to Ogg, a lossy codec (M4A and MP3 are other alternatives with Wax.) As a result, Barish has had no problem fitting his own substantial collection onto Wax’s 1TB HDD. But Wax also lets one encode with WAV or FLAC (personally, I do not hear any difference between these two and see no reason to waste precious disk space on the former.) Likewise, listening to the Wax Box’s analog output—AudioQuest makes a decent cable for the purpose—falls short of the stellar sonic result achieved by connecting the 3beez product with the Halide Bridge to my Anthem. A well-made piano recording (Leon Fleischer’s Two Hands) sounded more dimensional, with more commanding bass, when the Anthem’s DACs did the conversion.

But the Wax Box’s Realtek DACs are surely better-sounding than the stock soundcard in an off-the-shelf computer.

The Wax Box isn’t perfect, of course. It doesn’t do multichannel and some audiophiles will be disappointed by the relatively limited encoding options, specifically the lack of DSD-sourced codecs. Its storage capacity will strike some as limited, especially if large, losslessly encoded HD files are part of the mix. (An additional HDD can be easily connected to increase storage capacity.) But Barish is a man we need more of in the burgeoning area of computer audio: a creative engineer who makes a real effort to understand the needs and IT capabilities of his potential customer base.

The above descriptions of the Wax Box’s operation barely scratch the surface of what it can do, and, in a way, that’s the whole point. There are layers and layers of functionality that are kept, unthreateningly, just out of view until you are ready to use them. You can create playlists (“Queues”), search for a composer or artist of interest, export files to a portable player, and accomplish the bulk import of music already resident on your computer with gratifying efficacy. A new user can start processing a large music collection effectively on day one: The Wax software is highly sophisticated yet unquestionably the easiest to learn in my experience. Jeffrey Barish makes this point. “There’s a well-known phrase in designing computer software: ‘Simple things should be simple; difficult things should be possible.’ There are many music lovers who are not audiophiles. They just love music—they just want to hear Beethoven.”

Point taken, Jeffrey. Mission accomplished.

SPECS & PRICING

Drive capacity: Two 1TB drives (one for backup)
Interface: Direct Control with attached mouse, keyboard, and monitor or TV; Remote Control with VNC or RDP remote desktop viewer—available for
tablets and smartphones (iOS , Android, Windows Phone) and for desktops (OSX , Windows, Linux)
Analog output: 3.5mm miniplug
Digital output: Four USB-2 ports; three USB-3 ports; TosLink; DVI-D; D-Sub; HDMI; RJ45
Dimensions: 13.4″ x 12.6″ x 2.7″
Price: $5000

3beez
contact@3beez.com