Mike Frezon

IIRC, Ted, your wife helped a little bit, too!

There's Jessie the yodeling cowgirl. Bullseye, he's Woody's horse. Pete the old prospector. And, Woody, the man himself. Of course, it's time for Woody's RoundUp. He's the very best! He's the rootinest, tootinest cowboy in the wild, wild west!

Ted Lee

yikes...good memory mike!

man, like zen said, wifey is taking over my soul....pretty soon i'm going to have dafodil wallpaper!

this is my dvd collection. there are many like it, but this is my own ...

Mike Keith

Brian’s got it down, that's what I do. Rip all CD's with EAC and encode to APE on the fly, embed the cover art and titles then import into MC10 (J-Rivers) with Cinemar’s CD Lobby as the front end to select and build play lists on the fly it’s actually fun and even a guest can do it without instruction. Then add DVD Lobby and a changer like the CX777ES or another HD for the movies. No more media storage problems. I put my CD's and DVD cases in storage, in a closet. So many advantages to this configuration I cant even begin to explain, but the best part is instant music, and I mean instant, just select the cover art and click play of any song in the list and it's playing in less then a second. If you properly rip and encode with loss less encoder the copy is perfect bit for bit and with some digital EQ and normalizing it will sound better then the original and no level mismatch between songs. I can build a play list of several hundred songs in a few minutes and have gapless music all day.

Move into the 21st centry, get rid of media storage and single disc selection.

Mike Frezon

Gee Ted, what Doug & Brian & Mike have posted about storing all their CDs onto a hard drive, etc SOUNDS GREAT! I'd love to put all my CDs away into storage but have all the music accessible in my living room!

But, I also only understand about half of it.

Are you guys using computers which are hooked up to your HTs? Or are you using high-end speakers, etc attached to your PCs? Or are you doing something completely different?

Damn! I feel feeble as a 46-year-old. And I work in the media! Don't laugh at me fellas. :b

But I might go in this direction...to completely avoid the idea of replacing jewel cases or buying sleeves or binders or anything.

There's Jessie the yodeling cowgirl. Bullseye, he's Woody's horse. Pete the old prospector. And, Woody, the man himself. Of course, it's time for Woody's RoundUp. He's the very best! He's the rootinest, tootinest cowboy in the wild, wild west!

BrianB

Something completely different. I have a PC which acts as a fileserver. I have another device in my living room which hooks upto the PC over ethernet (wired or wireless) & plays the music files through my home theatre system.

There's numerous devices out there suitable for the job, it's all down to interface & what you want out of the device.

high resolution ipod featuring dlp hd programming is the best, almost as good as playstation 2 with wega windows media on a super cd! ps2 and tivo do dolby tv with broadband hdtv!

dpippel

The convenience factor of ripping all of your CDs and storing the data on a server is unquestionable. However, on a mid or high-end home sound system you're gonna take a hit on sound quality. MP3 does NOT sound as good as PCM, no matter how you encode it. Simply copying CD audio files is better, but unless you're feeding the output of your sound card via digital optical or coax to a receiver or processor with good DACs then again, sound quality will suffer. There's no way that audio from my PC is going to sound as good as direct analog output from my Denon 2900 to my Aragon Soundstage.

Careful man! There's a beverage here!

Mike Keith

I use a Digital coax from my Audigy Platinum Z2 output to the input of my Parasound Halo C2 processor. EAC is the only ripping engine that I know of that is perfect bit for bit ripping, and APE is a lossless encoder (not MP3).

I've done a lot of experimenting with the sound quality of this setup vs. my Sony 555ES CD player and there is absolutely no loss in sound quality, in fact with a bit of digital EQ and normalizing it sounds better and more dynamic then the original redbook CD.

Once you try a system like this you will throw rocks at youre CD player.

dpippel

After years of home audio experience, I'm a firm believer in the "less is more" school of thought. For 2 channel listening I use the analog output of my 2900, engage the player's Pure Direct mode with everything but the audio circuitry turned off, and use no bass management. That output gets fed to an analog input on the Soundstage with Stereo Direct mode activated, which also bypasses any additional D/A or A/D conversion.

I want to hear what's in the original recording reproduced as faithfully to the artist's intent as limitations of equipment and technology allow - no more, no less. In my opinion and in my experience, subjecting CD audio to additional encoding, "normalization", EQ, and other superfluous processing defeats that purpose and results in degradation of sound quality. YMMV.

Careful man! There's a beverage here!

Mike Keith

You can normalize and EQ after playback or not at all if you wish, the important thing is to make an exact bit for bit copy and either encode with a loss less encoder or not at all. This makes a perfect copy of the disc, no degradation what so ever. How one handles the file after that is a matter of preference, I like to normalize and EQ to help increase the dynamic range on poorly mastered CD’s. The recording makes far more difference then any hardware IMO, and many recordings are just terrible.

Ted Lee

mike f -

like brian said, there are numerous devices that will allow you to connect (in most cases wirelessly) your music collection from your pc to your home stereo. here's a couple examples:

http://www.dlink.com/products/?sec=1&pid=318
http://www.rokulabs.com/products/soundbridge/models.php

generally they work pretty well, but i agree with doug that you're going to take a hit on sound quality. the argument is simply convenience versus quality. on my media server (hp de200c ) i rip most of my stuff at 192. it works well enough when i just want "background" music. if i want the full blown experience then i just play the actual cd.

this is my dvd collection. there are many like it, but this is my own ...

Mike Frezon

Guys: I am learning a lot here. It all makes SO much sense and seems so much more practical than trying to store the CDs into thinner/better packaging.

I WOULD be concerned about loss in sound quality. While my gear is not high-end by any means...I easily hear differences in lower bit-rate audio files. So, the ability to copy the sound files full bit-rate is attractive.

However, I would not want to tie down one of my main home computers with the task of housing my music library. (I've got too much going on with those other PCs to ask them to also be my jukebox.) I would rather think in terms of hooking up a hard drive (almost like an iPod, but bigger) to my HT gear. I would think it would be better positioned as part of my physical HT environment. Any computer is in another part of my home. But I would also like to have the ability to see the cover art or have some kind of graphical interface to select the music I'm going to listen to. I suppose I could buy a separate stand-along PC to integrate into my system...but I think that's probably not in my budget at the time.

Ted: Thanks for the links. I see why these products are making it into the marketplace. I'm still trying to figure out, though what that HP200de thing is. I really can't believe how much I sound like a stupid old man sometimes. It kinda looks like a component version of an iPod with a CD player built-in. Close?!

There's Jessie the yodeling cowgirl. Bullseye, he's Woody's horse. Pete the old prospector. And, Woody, the man himself. Of course, it's time for Woody's RoundUp. He's the very best! He's the rootinest, tootinest cowboy in the wild, wild west!