I’ve been talking about getting a “network music player” for awhile now and luckily Santa was good to me this year and saved me the angst of trying to justify the purchase of one myself. Santa’s nice that way! Anyway, there are some competitors, but Slim Devices
http://www.slimdevices.com/ puts out this device called a Squeezebox, and that’s the one I (err, Santa) chose. It can wirelessly stream music files in various formats including mp3, flac, wma, aac (and probably a bunch more) from your PC’s hard drive to your stereo. It will also stream internet radio stations as well. I actually purchased last years model because the only thing that really changed was the form factor (the new one is taller) and I didn’t have much space in the cabinet. To me, the really cool thing is that I could never seem to find that one CD that I was looking for because it was either at work, in the car, in the upstairs entertainment center or the downstairs one. It was as easy as they say to setup (it literally only took 10 minutes) and sounds great to me. Plus the convenience is unmatched.
For me it was a better compromise than having multiple Mega-CD changes, because this way, I can still keep the original CD in the car, or wherever, and I can still listen to any CD in my collection. There are a few downsides though. For one thing, you need to rip (encode) all of your CD’s to some digital music format (I picked both MP3 and FLAC). If you have hundreds of CD’s in your collection this could take a long while. Also, since the Squeezebox is pulling the songs from your PC, it needs to be on for you to play the stereo. This isn’t a problem for me though because our PC is almost always powered on anyway.
Musically, I can’t tell the difference in quality from the original CD’s played on my admittedly old and cheap Sony CD player, and the MP3’s played through the Squeezebox. One of these days I plan on having some friends over for some double blind listening tests. I’ll let you know how that goes. I’m thrilled with it for now though.
Oh yeah, we’ve completely redone the family room including carpet, paint, entertainment center and TV since the last time I posted a picture of my system. I think it turned out pretty well. Pictures below: Btw, the display of the squeezebox looks kind of muddy with the shot I took, but actually it’s very clear and crisp.
The squeezebox is the little box sitting on top of my HK 3480:
