Hard disk music player.

[Ali Tait]

Just buy a long cable and either drill holes in the walls or run it round the rooms and through doors.

[kalozois100]

Just buy a long cable and either drill holes in the walls or run it round the rooms and through doors.

If i did that this is what i will get from the misses!!!!!!!

[Ali Tait]

If you do it carefully,running the cable along skirting boards etc,you can make a very neat job that will be almost unnoticeable.

[jester]

try a ps3 with a bigger hard drive rip to wav and copy works wonders for me havn't listened to a cd for over two years!

ps3 into dac u like into amps u like etc.....

[sastusbulbas]

Mentioning your budget would help.

One cheap option.

Popcorn Hour, and a 500gb drive.

http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinestore/

Hard drives vary in price and shopping around can get even better deals, I got a 640gb drive for £50 some time ago, and prices fluctuate. In my opinion getting a reputable model with morecapacity than required is desireable.

500gb £45, 640gb £65, 750gb £65, 1tb £75

You could build a PC for this too, probably cheaper than the prices below if you shop around, you can even get a case which is like a CD/dvd player for the PC.

Motherboard £60
CPU £60
Memory £20
Hard drive £45
CD drive £15
Sound Card £50
Power supply £35
Case £30

Or buy second hand or use any old kit?

I have an old PC built from old bits in the bedroom, small case, but out of sight. Running an M-Audio sound card and basic ATI graphics card. I use it for music and movies through a projector, it gives a better picture than the Denon DVD player that was in there.

I also have an old Mac G4, with a small hard drive and old OS which still plays music.

None of them need a large hard drive as I can connect an external HD to my router, letting all the computers in the house share a central location.

[kalozois100]

thanks jester and sastsubulbas . i'll look into your both suggestions. ....

Ah yes my budget is around 300 pound sterling. The play station sound interesting and i'll need one sooner or later as the children are growing up and enjoy playing on their cousins ps3.


Jester Does the ps3 come with different size hard disks or did you upgrade the hard disk yourself? Whats the highest gbs hard disk the ps3 will accept??

[jester]

there are different models of the ps3 I have the 40 gig ps3 and replaced the hard drive with a 250 gig. You have to use a 2.5 inch sata drive i belive you can get a 500 gig hard drive now.

fitting is very easy in fact there instructions for it. I use opitical out into my dac. Personaly i rip into atrac (hangover from mini disc) the PS3 will support wav files and i have a couple of files ripped into that. Album art was a little painful ended up copying it from albumart into the pictures folder and then editing the album. Time consuming but simple enough to do.

[kalozois100]

thanks jester. ps3 looks like the most likely way forward for me . also i can have same music files on my pc in the office to listen to music in there and to back up the music files on the ps3. whats the ps3 like as a transport for music files? Is it as good as pc streaming with foobar and asio4all?? Also is there coaxial out of ps3 as i prefer coax. to optical and have recently purchased a most excellent belden type one from markgrant.
regards,
kalozois

[NRG]

thanks for the reply Neal.
I have never personally seen or heard the sqeezebox. I do not know anyone who ownes one either. However i have read great things about it and some i gather prefer this method to a top cd transport. On a practical note, i gather it can receive wireless music files digitally. does the pc need to be on all the time ? i guess it would need to. Also what is the range of the wireless signal? eg does it have problems with walls or is the signal strong enough to transmit a long way? my pc set up is about 15 meters away from my lounge music set up. How does the sqeezebox in general work?? Would i have to connect to an external dac via usb or coaxial/optical? I already have a usb to coaxial adapter so that can be used to connect to the beresford dacif need be.
Appologies for the basic questions but i read about the squeezebox on their site and it doesn't seem to inform on the above queries.
Thanks kalozois

The PC only needs to be on when playing the library, you can setup the SB to use the squeezenetwork to access internet radio without the PC switched on.

Also the SB supports wake-on-lan....IE you power up the SB and it sends a wake up packet over the network to the server bringing it out of standby. You can set the server to enter standby after a predetermined time of inactivity via the power saving configuration options...setting this via XP is very easy.

You can buy from Ebuyer a pre-built PC for just under 200 quid inc VAT and delivery, forget building one. They have a Proliant server with 160GB drive and 1GB memory and also a desktop Celeron based PC with a 320GB drive for the same price...no OS though but Keyboard and mouse included.

Wireless range depends on the router and also how far away it is from the SB IE how many walls etc will the signal pass through...if you have a laptop and can connect to the router from the same location as where the SB would live then you should be OK. You can also bridge routers or buy an extender/repeater to increase the range if it proves to be a problem.

You can use the SB with an external DAC or it has it's own inbuilt...it's not brilliant but that depends on what your expectations are...

[Class]

From what I've read,the SB sounds much better wired up as opposed to wireless.

No. Unless your wireless connection is bad, there's no difference.
Some people will gladly sell you a $1000 CAT5 cable and claim it's a huge upgrade in sound quality. These people have zero knowledge in TCP-IP and networking in general.

Due to network congestion, traffic load balancing, or other unpredictable network behavior, IP packets can be lost or delivered out of order. TCP detects these problems, requests retransmission of lost packets, rearranges out-of-order packets, and even helps minimize network congestion to reduce the occurrence of the other problems. Once the TCP receiver has finally reassembled a perfect copy of the data originally transmitted, it passes that datagram to the application program. Thus, TCP abstracts the application's communication from the underlying networking details.

(Wikipedia)

The SB Duet is a lovely bit of kit.

The SB3 (now Classic) has a better DAC than the Duet IIRC.