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:

nice setup man!! but me, I use my xbox 360 to stream medias to my home theater. I can stream internet radio, pictures, and songs from my server. I cant live without it.

Nice. I've always thought that the squeezebox has the best options. I kinda wish it came in a more standard home audio form factor, but that would be likely just a waste of materials.

Which music did you encode as FLAC, and which as MP3? I started down the FLAC road for all of my 300 CDs because of the exact CD-quality thing. Then I thought that to justify all the hard drive space, I should probably just confirm that I can actually *tell the difference* between FLAC and 128-320 VBR MP3. I did listening tests with some sample music, and could honestly not tell the difference with most of the tunes (mostly rock-ish stuff). I was, however, able to notice a difference in some Tallis Scholars tracks. The ambience of the cathedral was noticeably reduced on the MP3. Makes me think that if I listened long and hard enough, I'd be able to discern a difference in most of my music, but I'm not too concerned. At the moment I just FLAC encode the stuff that's REALLY REALLY important, and MP3 the rest.

I'd be interested to hear the results of any blind tests you happen to run.

Thanks for the nice comments.

I wound up just encoding everything (50 CD's at a time) in both FLAC and MP3 that way I'd be covered either way. Both were burned to DVD data disks. I had service encode them for me, so in this case it's easier (and cheaper) to get all the formats I want the first time.

Right now, I don't have a ton of extra disk space so I just copied the MP3's, and left the FLAC on DVD's. If I ever become suspicious that I'm missing something with MP3, I'll had another hard disk (they're cheap, I'm just lazy) and stream those instead.

I'm glad to hear that you generally can't tell the difference between the two formats. So for the ambience of the cathedral that you describe, are these "quiet" passages? I'll look for something similar in my collection to try out.

Wegiz,

The main track that I noticed the difference on was Allegri's Miserere performed by the Tallis Scholars. Basically, it's something like 16 mixed voices or so performing a beautifully uncomplicated Renaissance piece in a big quite resonant cathedral. I first became acquanited with the piece because I happened to be given two tickets to the piece performed by a Russian vocal ensemble at the Orpheum theatre in Vancouver. I'm kind of glad I didn't know what to expect. Basically, the piece seems to follow the following pattern: all voices, male voices, then "mystery voices" (to be quite crude - my wife who is a symphony musician would be rolling her eyes). The piece was quite nice, I was enjoying it, then this section started and I had no idea who was singing it. I was sitting just under the balcony and what I didn't know was that there were about 4-6 vocalists standing right at the front of the balcony, just out of my view. All I was hearing from them was reflected sound, so it sounded like it was coming from all locations at once. Almost like it was coming from inside my head. That was my point of reference. It's since become one of my all time favourite pieces. I prefer the Tallis Scholars recording the best (so far!).

John