"Serge Auckland" wrote in message
...

"MrTea" wrote


I have thought long and hard about this but I think Digital Audio is
improving all the time, and can now be stored at near hifi quality so I
would rather have a single media store (with all the benefits this
offers) and a decent enough amp to power my Kef Concerto floorstanders
whilst also thinking (later) about whole house distribution.

My budget is modest!

Any thoughts or suggestions welcomed.


A single media store does have advantages, especially now that storage
costs have come down such that you can store CDs as linear WAV files, so
absolutely no quality loss over the original CD. A 300G hard drive will
store some 500 typical CDs without any compression, and some 2000 is you
use a modest 4:1 compression like 320kbps MP3.

However, there are some disadvantages:-

The storage box will not be silent, as big hard-drives make a noise. Add
to that the internal fan usually present, and it's like having a PC in the
room. Not a problem if you can put the box out of the way in another room,
under the stairs etc, but a nuisance if you have it in the same room.

If you don't back up your music collection, one day you will have a disc
crash and lose the lot. Backup is relatively easy, but if effectively
doubles the cost of storage. Alternatively, you can back up by keeping the
original CDs, but restoring your library of, say, 1000 CDs won't be
something to tackle in an idle half-hour.



As ever, good advice from Serge - I would like to endorse the view that,
sooner or later, there very likely *will* be a failure in a mass storage
system. A possibly pessimistic, but not entirely *unrealistic*, rule of
thumb for a domestic 'power user' (based on personal experience and what I
have heard/seen from others in a similar position) would be a failure rate
of *one hard disk per annum*!!

Not to have a full backup (secondary storage) is a disaster waiting to
happen. I am now over the 2 TB mark myself (1400+ CDs, 430 DVD-Vs) - if I
had that lot stored singly on hard disk only and lost it, it would be a
tragedy/****er to put it very mildly! Even with a backup, the task of
reloading it all would not be a trivial undertaking....