Audio player device

Dr.EM

Dr.EM

Dr.EM

Soldato
Joined
15 Jun 2006
Posts
3,900
Location
Swindon
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!?
 
Ah indeed. Shall say around £500 max? Something cheaper which requires an external DAC is also up for consideration :)
 
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 :D
 
Logitech Squeezebox Duet/Classic and a NAS/computer in another room? Quite tricky to think of much else with such a low budget.

Dave
 
There's very few all in one systems that are any good, and the ones around cost way outside your budget (e.g. Naim HDX).
You clearly already have a PC, so as a starting point, use that to cut all of your CDs to FLAC format. EAC or DBPowerAmp are both good apps to do this.
The first thing to spend your budget on are some fairly big hard drives. If your PC has internal space, add a decent size internal and then a seperate additionally USB drive so that you can have your music collection fully backed up. If you have a decent sized music collection, it'll take weeks to fully cut all of your music, do it once and make sure that WHEN your hard drive fails, that you don't need to do it again.

You then have a variety of options on streaming, e.g.
- NAS (network available storage). These can operate in the background and are a good central repository for your data, allowing you to stream to multiple devices around the home. Can require a bit more knowledge than streaming from a PC, but requires less power to run. The biggest downside is the cost. You could probably buy a fairly good Netbook for the cost of a decent NAS, and as music streaming requires little CPU power, a netbook is a good solution.
- From a Netbook, or your PC to a streamer. The classic example is the Squeezebox, but there's now other options including Sonus and some of the newer AV amplifiers and BD players can also stream.
- Some newer devices can connect directly to an external USB drive. So you use your PC to cut your music collection, then move your USB drive to wherever the stereo is and don't need to bugger about with having to run PCs or play with networks. Have to say that this is the route I'll be taking. There's a variety of media devices to do this already (e.g. WD TV live), though most are not the optimum spec from purely a music device. The upcoming SB Touch will happily deal with HD audio at upto 24/96 natively and is looking like it'll be great. The only problem is that it's been muted for months and still has a "possible" date of May(ish).
 
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 :D).

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!
 
One option that might set you a little over budget is a second hand Mac Mini. Once setup they can run headless (ie no monitor/keyboard etc) and can be set to automatically rip a CD once loaded and the itunes can be controled by an itouch/iphone. Minis are also pretty quiet. Use the digital output on the mac to feed a Beresford DAC into your exisitng hifi.

Dave
 
Dr.EM, everything is possible and probably available, the issue become budget.
Naim do a one box solution, Meridian have system as well as do Linn, all will sound excellent and make nice hole in your pocket ;)
 
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.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom