Music servers

I was just quickly looking at another thread with a link to Japanese SACDs, which appear to be around $50, and it occurred to me another advantage of music servers is the ability to download high-res files, store them, and play them back. I can’t really imagine why a Japanese SACD should cost $50 or more. Shipping can’t be that high. Along the same line, new vinyl recordings seem to be around the $30 mark, and they are made in the U.S. (I think).

On the other hand, it is a market driven economy, and if people are willing to pay $30 to $50 for better sounding music then so be it. Personally, while I might splurge once in a while, I prefer lower cost, but good to great sounding music, and so far it has been via CDs and SACDs.

Other than for royalties, and making a ‘fair’ profit, I hope the record industry does not try and delay the move to high-res downloads simply for more money. Strip out the greed part, and everyone should benefit by high-res downloads, with no copy protection.

Then, no matter what music server you have, you will benefit by having a better technical quality music that a CD player cannot play.

Just in case you change your mind about using something that doesn't actually have way to load CD's, I have to recommend a NAS.

I plugged a Synology DS710+ NAS into my router and haven't looked back. I rip CD's with iTunes, mount the music folder from the Synology onto my desktop, and simply drag the ripped tunes from the iTunes window into the folder, which copies them onto the server.

Another plus is the Synology mirrors the drives, so you have a backup. I've ripped about 800 CD's and it roughly takes up about 500GB's (and that's as uncompressed AIFF files). Since I loaded it with two 2T hard drives, I've also begun ripping my small-ish DVD collection to the drive. Now, if the kids want to watch Wall-E, they fire up the xBox, open the Synology folder and select the movie.

I also use it to back my wife's computer up wirelessly. I can access my library over the internet via my iPhone or iPad, and I can even install security cameras, which I plan to do to check up on the house when we're on vacation. I don't want to find out my hot water heater exploded 5 minutes after we left the house for two weeks!

Anyway, I use the Squeezebox touch to stream the music, which is about as wife-friendly as these things can get- plain English on a touch screen. There is a GREAT iPhone and iPad native app called iPeng that I use with the touch. It's been a complete replacement for the stock remote, or even the touch the screen, actually. The built in DAC is very good, but I use a digital coaxial into a Cary Xciter DAC.

Oh, and I've fallen in love with 96K-24bit files!

No matter what you do, ripping CD's in an lossless format is the way of the future! Good luck!

Your answer is right here in the forum:

http://www.polkaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1538963

tonyb wrote: »

Sure, love to see you try and load a cd into it. Though if thats your bag,the modded PS is worth it alone.
I think I pretty much decided to hunt down a q-sonix used. Has everything I want plus it gets some great reviews.

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do? You want a music server, but you still want to load cd's? Aren't you going to rip the cd's onto the server? I'm missing something...

Why can't this just be easy (and good quality sound)? I have been researching this digital music crap for 6 months and haven't gotten any better solution than when I started, no matter what price range I look at!

With the plethora of companies that create high end amps, preamps, CDP's, turntables, cables, etc, why aren't there good audio companies out there making a good quality, easy to use interface (larger touchscreen), easy to rip, multiple output, low jitter, and multiple format music server all-in-one system that sounds great? Every one I look at, even ones costing up to $5K (which there is no way I could afford), don't have everything in one easy package. It's constantly a matter of what things your willing to give up. So far, squeezebox touch seems to be the closest thing and most reasonable way to do it, but I would still like more.

EDIT: Must also have remote control and Internet Radio for background music.

fishbones wrote: »

Why can't this just be easy (and good quality sound)? I have been researching this digital music crap for 6 months and haven't gotten any better solution than when I started, no matter what price range I look at!

With the plethora of companies that create high end amps, preamps, CDP's, turntables, cables, etc, why aren't there good audio companies out there making a good quality, easy to use interface (larger touchscreen), easy to rip, multiple output, low jitter, and multiple format music server all-in-one system that sounds great? Every one I look at, even ones costing up to $5K (which there is no way I could afford), don't have everything in one easy package. It's constantly a matter of what things your willing to give up. So far, squeezebox touch seems to be the closest thing and most reasonable way to do it, but I would still like more.

I think it can't be easy (like all in one little box that sits next to your turntable easy) because digital music is still a rapidly evolving area. Plus, there are a lot more moving parts in a music server, and by that I don't mean the CD tray. I'm talking about the UI (good UI design doesn't seem to come naturally to high-end audio electronics companies), the fact that it has to be networked and capable of doing a lot more than just decoding music, etc.

Actually, I think the CD tray and hard drive would be pretty easy for Logitech to put in a Squeezebox, but there's no reason for them to because A) they're prone to failure and would make for more customer service headaches, and customers are practically guaranteed of having that hardware elsewhere in their house. Wireless networks are ubiquitous and 1TB external hard drives are cheap. I agree that there are some downsides to putting together a system like this. It assumes you either have a home server that is always on, or you have to move music to the storage connected to your player everytime you rip. I don't know how easy Squeezebox makes this.

I think the closed systems are so expensive for a few reasons... limited market to early adopters who want simple, all-in-one solutions; a lot of them are intended to anchor whole home solutions where a $20K installation makes a $5K server look not terribly expensive; and there probably are some copyright issues. The industry big boys won't go after a niche device that costs $10K like they will a mass market device that costs $500. This exact thing happened with a product that could rip and store DVD/Blu-Ray. Maybe they figure if you have $10K to spend on the device you're not going to be spending your time sharing your media on Pirate Bay.

Ultimately, I think most people in the market now are best served by using a home computer and whatever endpoint (like Squeezebox or WD TV Live or Sonos) does the best job of meeting their needs. Sinking $3K plus into a closed system at this point sounds like something I'd regret in a couple of years when I wanted to upgrade and couldn't turn the thing over because it was obsolete.

I think the Squeezebox + Squeezecenter + computer option is not as complicated as you are thinking. For the most part, alot of these products are designed for ease of use. There are options that exist for advanced users, but honestly aside from setting the folder where your music is, there's not much you have to do (using Squeezecenter as an example). The software is pretty mature, and I have yet to experience any issue where player doesn't see software or visa versa.

Honestly, once you have Squeezecenter installed and a CD ripper installed (dbpoweramp cd ripper for ex.), there are only 2 steps you need to learn and repeat.

1 - rip CD using the dbpoweramp utility (to FLAC for instance) to your music folder
2 - hit the refresh button in Squeezecenter to update it's database

The learning curve is relatively low (for you, your wife, etc.) and once you do it a few times, it becomes trivial. Otherwise, I don't see any other maintenance required honestly. You should give yourself & wife a little more credit

With regards to buying a computer for media serving, you don't need a powerhouse. There are few occasions where server-side decoding is required - AAC lossless is the only one I can think of off of the top of my head.

fishbones wrote: »

Therein lies part of the issue (for me). Having to buy a dedicated computer to sit there for just music all the time costs more money, won't be as user-friendly for my anti-technical wife and kid (compared to pushing an on button), creates more in the chain to have problems with, more noise introduced in the chain, more wires, more to turn on/off/shutdown/startup. My wife and I's laptops in the house are both used often, and I take mine to work with me everyday. Which leaves buying a separate computer for just that.

Why not just use one of these laptops? Just connect a hard drive to it.

fishbones wrote: »

As far as iTunes, I have read on more than one occasion that they use some sort of filtering in thier website that reduces the sound quality (which can't be changed) - even though it is showing perfect bitstreaming. Is this so?

No. You're thinking of playing through iTunes. You're not doing that here. You're ripping through iTunes, and letting iTunes build a library for you. Then you're using the Squeezebox to stream the media, which will stream bit perfect for you.

fishbones wrote: »

As far as an iPod, I didn't think you could download Lossless onto a stock one, unless you had some modification done to it by a unauthorized third party? I could be wrong about this too?

You can't use FLAC without Rockbox'ing your iPod. But you can use ALAC. Even handier, though - enable the setting in iTunes that automatically transcodes the Apple Lossless files to 128kb AAC when you load onto the iPod. So you maintain a lossless library, but iTunes cuts it down to 128kb just for the ipod.

nspindel wrote: »

Even handier, though - enable the setting in iTunes that automatically transcodes the Apple Lossless files to 128kb AAC when you load onto the iPod. So you maintain a lossless library, but iTunes cuts it down to 128kb just for the ipod.

Why? So you have the lossless file on your computer, and a lossy file on the iPod. That makes no sense from a music server perspective.

I have been using an iPod Classic 120Gb and a Wadia dock for over 2 years now as an excellent music server. Storing music on the iPod in Apple Lossless reduces the uncompressed file size approximately 50%, and it is still lossless when uncompressed. The Wadia dock extracts the digital off the iPod and when sent to the DAC it sounds great (assuming you have half-way decent gear).

nspindel,

What's the default media player for the Squeezebox? Twonky?