Tips?: hardware... media playback device

[David]

Thanks very much each of you for your comments. Basil, I learned a bit
from my father about (serious audiophile) hi-fi, who was messing about
with amps and speakers all the time and was pretty fussy with acoustics
in the home when I was a teenager (a mattress up against the window for
the arvo?!?). My current home environment doesn't let me be as fussy as
he, though, so I accept a compromise or two.

I like FLAC, coz, as far as I can tell, it's a non-lossy compressed
format, though I have quite a few high bit-rate mp3s too. Andre, I've
converted quite a lot of my CDs to FLAC etc and having them on a hard
disk just takes up less physical space (I can put the CDs away somewhere
less accessible). I like having a FLAC back-up of certain CDs too coz I
know it'd be hard to buy them again (out of "print"). Thanks for the
tips, Andre - that page of links for FLAC is useful. The Olive Symphony
has me curious, but I couldn't find an Australian website mentioning it. 

Thanks very much for the info about streaming around the home from
playback on the computer - that's all a new world to me and I could
check that out. My initial hope was for some device which I can park
next to the hi-fi system, connected up to my receiver's input, a device
that either has its own hard drive or controls the files fed into it
from a generic external hard drive - a device that lets me navigate
through the hard disk's folders, maybe access playlists, through a basic
display on its body.

I figure the audio output quality from a (volume-regulated) headphone
socket on an iPod or other thing such as netbook must be poorer than
from a conventional line-out socket on units like CD players.

FYI, my amp is a Harmon/Kardon HK3250 receiver, bought in the late 90s.
It has several auxiliary input jacks, some labelled for convenience sake
as VCR1 and VCR2. Input impedance for CD, video etc is given as 150mV.
It has pre-amp output RCA sockets on it too. David Fawcett, I don't know
what 24-bit S/PDIF outputs are.

Thanks Callan, for all the suggestions - I assume the Squeezebox needs
the computer running ("serving" the music). Sounds interesting. Matthew,
what's a duet and a boom?

Cheers,

David



On Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:12 +1000, "Matthew Hannigan" <mlh at zip.com.au>
wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 10:14:04PM +1000, David wrote:
> > [ ... ]
> > Does anyone know of a device designed for audio playback of stored music
> > files without a TV being necessary such as I've described, or is a
> > laptop computer the only way to do it?? If the latter, can you get a
> > better quality output than the headphone socket?
> 
> I, and many others use a Squeezebox (http://www.mysqueezebox.com/)
> I have a duet and a boom.  It supports FLAC.
> 
> You can download the gpl squeezeboxserver software and have a look at
> it without buying any hardware. http://www.mysqueezebox.com/download
> You can even download it standard Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora package managers.
> 
> The squeezebox hardware value add over a simple computer is their
> choice of quality* components.  
> 
> 
> * I sort of avoid the term audiophile.  To me the term is 
> exemplified by people who buy monster audio cables or buy a cd
> player for 20 times the amount without a audible difference.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>