Originally Posted by
montesquieu
Coming late to this discussion, very interesting though.
I have asyncronous USB input now on my Audio Note DAC (kit 2.1x with upgraded components to essentially 4.1x spec) ... I wonder if the Pi could be made to work with it? Essentially would need either USB output or co-axial.
2TB NAS seems very reasonable in price these days - I have a couple of hundred CDs-worth of autorip MP3 files to download from amazon (should be far more but most CDs I buy tend to be from marketplace vendors), ripping a few thousand CDs could be a pain though and I probably won't bother .. I briefly had Spotify when I owned a SB Touch but it was useless for Classical music as very little in my specialist areas was available. Though I suspect I'd mainly use it to play rips of things like rare 78s which people have put up online.
Overall the user experience on the Touch (and the various phone apps) was pants for Classical mainly due to the database problem, even with no more than 100 or so CDs ripped - J.S. Bach being treated as different to Bach, J.S or, indeed, from Bach JS, with additional confusion about what constitutes a 'work' - classification at the 'song' level is a pretty poor basis for a useful taxonomy. But there are, I believe, better answers to this now through purchasing different database services. Ripping and manual tagging are only for trainspotter/OCD types - I remember a teacher I once had kept a meticulous, beautifully handwritten card index for his massive collection of cassettes .... not for me then or now!
SQ-wise, I found the Touch, even with an upgraded PSU, to be markedly inferior to the Audio Note CDT2/II transport - when added to the data management issue, it all meant that I just gave up on the whole streaming malarkey. (several times I actually).
Beyond the technical questions though, my main objection to all this is really philosophical - if music is found, started or stopped at a click, from a line in massive database, doesn't it cheapen the listening experience? I certainly found that with Spotify. As a musician myself I can't really be going with music as sonic wallpaper. The effort of manually selecting, opening, placing a physical object on or inside a device, operating that device, reading sleeve notes or libretti, and prior to that physically purchasing and owning something tangible, all this brings something to the listening experience that scrolling down a list on a screen can never provide.
