Chuck T

Help Designing new System

Greetings, I am begining to plan for a new stereo setup for my living room. I hope to get some input on what I should do on the receiver end. I am considering one of the following:
Denon AVR-3803
Onkyo TX-NR801
The 2 room - 2 source is very important to me. We do not watch a lot of movies so the "home Theatre" portion of the system is not as important as the music side. I want to hook up a CD/DVD player, I am considering buying Sonys 400 CD changer, I have about 700 CD's with 1 or 2 of theses I can put all my music inside and eliminate my CD rack. I am also in the process of converting all my CD's into MP3's It would obviosly be much smaller and most likely can get all my music in one of the 400 CD changers since they also play MP'3. I know im loosing sound quality by doing this - Im ripping at 128 and considering going up to 192. I also paln to hook up Satellite radio most likely both Sirius and XM. I plan to hook up XM with a digital out so I need a Digital in which both receivers have. My question is with the computer and MP3's. I am considering putting a small computer in with my stereo equipment to control the XM PCR and to play MP3's I noticed Onkyo has a Net Tune protocol and ethernet port. SOunds like this would allow me to put the computer in a different room or use my existing computer. I am having a hard time finding out much info on this feature even looking at Onkyo's site. I would like to be able to pick MP's via the TV screen or by using a laptop with a wireless network and PC Anywhere software or something similar.

I have not bought anything and I am looking at doing this withen the next 6 months. I need to do all the computer netowrking and stereo design, I figure I should start off doing it right so I can do it one time.

I plan to Spend 2-3K on this setup not counting the computer stuff. SPeakers is another whole delimma I went to tweeter and fell in love with some Boston towers, I know everyone has an opinion about speakers, im open for suggestions on anything.

BillSune

Chuck,

I've had a chance to play with both the Denon and The Onkyo. If you can find it swing a Onkyo 900 or 901. Both are very cool receivers if for nothing else but because of the Net Tune feature. I love the Net Tune feature all of my cd's are currently being transfered to WMA because of the better quality. It does let you pick your MP3 or WMA on screen by different categories. Genre, Artist, Title, or Playlist. This is all done through a Net Tune software you download from there website. If you have any questions about Net Tune let me know. I'm actully running an all Polk Audio LSi Speaker system and the onkyo powers them beautifully.
The only difference between the 900 and the 901 is Component Video up-conversion, but the remote has 2 macro's on it to make up for this.


Bill