"Michael Chare" wrote in message
...
"Geoff Mackenzie" wrote in message
...
Brennan JB7

Does anyone have experience (or comments) on this? On the face of it
looks ideal for my needs - copies CDs but much more importantly allows me
to record my LPs from my own turntable and pre-amp, unlike those godawful
machines frequently advertised in the mass media.. Also has a 60wpc
power amp built in which would do me very nicely. For a bit south of 400
quid it seems too good to be true.

Any views?

Geoff MacK


I've recently started storing my CDs on a NAS and then streaming them to
my hifi system using uPnP.
This works well enough, but I am glad that I have some redundancy as the
Samsung 1.5TB Ecogreen hard disk in the NAS failed after 27 days!

The hard disk (and the NAS) came from eBuyer. On Tuesday 29th there were
28 people ahead of me in the returns dept queue. By Wednesday mid day this
had reduced to about 9, so I waited and they actually answered after just
a few minutes. The disk should have been collected on Thursday, but no one
came.

I ordered a replacement from Scan (different brand of disk) that was
supposed to be shipped on Tuesday to arrive on Wednesday, but was shipped
and arrive a day late.

Another advantage of the this approach is that the NAS can be kept
somewhere where the noise of its spinning disk and fans are not a problem
(my attic)



Spinning disks and fans will soon become a thing of the past when SSDs
become cheaper and more commonplace, but what interests me are your comments
about non-deliveries and non-collections at various arranged times.

I bought a Mac Mini online on Tuesday evening from an outfit called Laptops
Direct - which pretty quickly got morphed into 'BuyItDirect'! (??) Anyway,
it was just too late for next day 'guaranteed' delivery on Wednesday and so,
in all innocence, I expected it yesterday and *bingo* it didn't arrive -
despite them having nearly twice as long as most 'overnight orders' in which
to get it delivered!

OK, not the end of the world, especially as we are both about this week so
it didn't mean I was chained to the door, but bloody annoying all the same!

It doesn't happen often (I don't buy stuff that often) but I suspect it's
getting more and more likely lately if you stray too far from reliable
evergreens like Amazon - even eBay is a better bet than the online stores
from what I can see of it, providing you don't find out the hard way that
what you have bought is coming from China!