Audio player device

Dr.EM · 2 Mar 2010 at 22:05

I have a dodgy CD player and rather than replace it I was thinking that some kind of audio/media player might be more convenient.

Ultimately, I'm looking for something I can load CDs onto in PCM/FLAC/OGG format where they'll be stored on a hard disk (I presume). A remote control is needed as is a good interface with a screen. It must also be very quiet, silent ideally (rules out magnetic drives?) and fit in with standard Hi-Fi equiptment (19" wide etc).

Just a preliminary shout out, not looked at such things before! I guess a rack mount, remote control iPod is sort of what I'm after!?

Dr.EM · 3 Mar 2010 at 13:39

Ah indeed. Shall say around £500 max? Something cheaper which requires an external DAC is also up for consideration

Dr.EM · 21 Mar 2010 at 23:03

Any ideas anyone? I don't know what manufacturers to look at even. Well under £500 is fine also, I just wanted to set an upper limit

Dr.EM · 22 Mar 2010 at 11:24

Thanks for your responses

Mr_Sukebe, It sounds like your last idea is closest to what I'd want. I'll look into it more. The extranal HDD I have now is extremely noisy though, which is a bit of a downside. A quieter drive and fanless box might do (or SSD

).

I find it hard to believe there isn't a box that I can, say, place a loaded HDD into (or even HCSD/multiple cards), stream music from it decoding from FLAC and output via a high quality DAC.

It should be entirely possible when you consider the effective cost of each stage; ie HDD to USB interface, £12 or so in some external boxes, may not even be required, just some sort of data sream convertor to feed the decoder the right signals. Digital audio decoder/processor, included in even the cheapest MP3 players (may need to be a little more sophisticated for FLAC). DAC, even moderately priced soundcards and audio interfaces can include high spec DACs now, the chips certainly arn't expensive anymore. I guess the GUI would be the most complex part but again, even quite cheap MP3 players include at least some sort of interface.

If I was a bit more keen on digital systems I'd look into building something myself!

Dr.EM · 22 Mar 2010 at 19:43

divuk83, interesting option, but certainly overbudget seeing as I don't already have and iPhone/iTouch!

9designs2, I expect that will generally be the case then. Annoying as I know the component parts for such a unit arn't intrinsically costly, I guess that's just 'supply & demand' though and such units arn't widely used

I will already be having home built amplifiers, crossover/pre-amp and speakers, may as well look into building my own digital audio player! Not really my area though.