Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Opinions on future of standalone music hard drives

Just to add another idea on the topic - a lot of the scratch-built arcade game guys (like myself - I have a home-built arcade cabinet) also build scratch-built jukeboxes. You can get monitors and touch screens from Happ Controls to address not wanting something that looks like a computer.

Bren R.

I think Apple's "digital hub" concept encompasses the general desires you're talking about here. I'm not saying that's the best solution, but I think they're heading in the right direction. I currently use iTunes and an iPod to organize my music and play it through my home stereo. I used to just pipe it in directly from my home computer over a very long analog audio cable, but I rearranged the living room and now the cable doesn't reach.

My ideal solution would be a stand-alone music server device. It would have room for 4 internal (hot-swappable!)hard drives. It would come either pre-configured/pre-loaded with a RAID 5 (3 + hotspare) array or empty so that geeks can do their own RAID arrays. (RAID 5 is a great compromise between redundancy and least waste, with a hotspare, up to two drives can fail before you start losing data.) It costs about $500 to buy a half-terabyte array. That's enough to store over 700 CD's worth of uncompressed music.

The back of the device would include a removable power cable, ethernet jack, firewire port, and both optical and coax digital audio outs. The unit would be fanless as well, relying on ample heat-sinks to dispense heat from the drives and power supply.

To get music onto the server from your computer, you'd either connect with a firewire cable (like a giant iPod), or over the network with ethernet. Any management of the device would be done via a web interface over the network. (This avoids the headache of having to support software on multiple operating systems.)

The device would naturally also be able to stream music over the internet.

I think that covers my ideas.

pmbuko, that sounds awesome. I'd just add

• Analog outs for people who don't like the stereo DACs on their receivers and for those who want 6-channel audio (SACD, DVD-A), since most receivers have to get 6-channel this way


• Bass management, for hi-rez audio


• And, as an alternate feature, a single-disk transport built-in that can read and rip files from CD/DVD/DVD-A/SACD media, burning them of course to the massive hard drive.

The Yamahas have this approach, minus bass mgt and hi-rez, b/c they only seem to function on CD right now.

Basically I'm seeing what you see, but as a combo of your hard disk array (love the RAID setup and flexibility for upgrades) with a universal player for ripping, at least as an option. Clearly some people will prefer to save money by avoiding a transport on the server and just ripping files via their PC -- but it would be a nice convenience, and a necessity for thousands of buyers.

Apparently the industry is handicapping all these variations as we brainstorm. This series on Multimedia Network Players recently written for "Tom's Hardware" says there are three approaches pending right now on PC-audio-video convergence:

• Network media players


• Multimedia servers


• Media center PCs

Network media players are an early adopter thing, but without hard drives they are not the future. Multimedia servers would appear to be the audiophile way, while Media Center PCs looks like a mass market solution .... With Universal Players on the horizon at <$150 and hard drives similarly cheap, some form of a mid-fi multimedia server would seem to me to be the natural first champion here. While a multimedia PC is not a bad idea, and may be the ultimate future, it seems easier for people to adopt multimedia-digital components into their systems than to have to go out an buy a PC system for the whole deal.

So I guess this means that once again Apple gets it on the design side. Of course, they won't make any money on their brilliant innovations, but that's another story ....

Birdman

If only Steve Jobs would hire me as an idea-guy....

One of the worlds highest quality audio company also has been an entrant in this field. I think that they have been involved for quiet a few years.

http://www.linn.co.uk/spec_sound/products.cfm?range=knekt&refererURL=http://www.linn.co.uk/

Linn has been known for several things - audiophile quality products, especially sources (turntables, cd players).

Just doing a search for "htpc" will get you into a whole evening's worth of diy fantasies. Here are a couple of mine:
http://www.cappuccinopc.com/dg1.asp - I kept this under $900.00 with 160GB drive and Windows XP Home. Don't even need XP home if you're savvy enough to take linux on. Or, if you really want redundant RAID, go with a custom case like this.

Funny how it seems expensive if it's an audio component, but cheap if it's a computer, eh?

Drool.

Oops. Redundant RAID is...well...redundant.

I saw a sign in a store today that read "ATM Machine". I thought to myself, "morons".

"Funny how it seems expensive if it's an audio component, but cheap if it's a computer, eh?"

No kidding. Here's hoping "convergence" means lower prices and commodification where appropriate.

Reminds me of the "La Brea Tar Pits" in Los Angeles. "La Brea" means "The Tar" in Spanish. So when people say "let's go to the La Brea Tar Pits museum" they're saying The The Tar Tar Pits.

Ok, back to the topic now...

or there's my personal favorite (and I'm guilty too) the PIN number.