In article , Guy Dawson
wrote:

Nige wrote:
I'm in need of some advice on setting up a good quality domestic stereo
system based on digital audio files.

I'm looking to integrate my CD collection, A/V system and PC to enable
to easily find and play CDs.

The standard way of doing this is to use a PC to store the audio files
and some sort of player unit to play them out to the A/V system.

I'm probably going to go with a Windows PC (my existing one) running
iTunes and an SoundBridge to read the data from the PC, convert the
audio to PCM (the audio format used by CDs) and output it the A/V amp
which contains a DAC. If you have a pure stereo system an
external DAC or the DAC built into the SoundBridge could be used.

Why do you prefer not to use a PC?

Guy


Actually Guy, I use a Mac rather than a PC - but obviously that doesn't
affect the basis of your question. I suppose I could use the computer -
I just hadn't thought it would be necessary. Looking at the SlimDevice
Squeezebox mentioned by Nick Gorham (thanks Nick..) and the Sonus
system - both of which use a networked computer - this does appear to
be a viable option.

But given the low cost of massive hard drives these days, I still
wonder why no-one has come up with a self-contained 'audiophile' system
- or have they?

Nige