On Fri, 14 Nov 2003 14:44:55 -0000, "Stimpy"
wrote:

Tim Hobbs wrote:

The boys at work are building me such a box right now. With DVD
writer, freeview TV tuner, 160Gb disk and more ports you could shake a
stick at it will cost £400 odd plus VAT. It's all built into a neat
cubic box and will be on my LAN so I can use it as a fileserver too.
Audio quality won't be audiophile, but I can live with that for the
convenience it will give me in general use.

Stick a decent sound card in it - or an external one - and rip your CDs at
320kpbs and you'll get as good quality as you'd get from the Sony


My view exactly. The box / board combo has on-board sound. I have
low expectations of it, but will try it out first and then perhaps add
a decent third-party board if I the in-built stuff won't cut it.
There's only room for 2 PCI cards and I don't want lots of bits
hanging out of USB connectors if I can help it.

What I do want is lots of disk space as I'm getting quite into the
camcorder thing as we have a new baby and my brother is a competitive
athlete. I'm looking at a terabyte disk array as my next project
(once the bruising on the credit card goes down after Christmas).

The Sony box was OK sound wise (it's playing compressed audio, so
isn't going to be any match for the Arcam it sits on top of and cost
half as much as) but has a nasty habit of corrupting all the data...


--
Tim Hobbs