Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim Lesurf[_2_]
I wouldn't base a system on a laptop, either. But found it easy enough to use a desktop box. Works fine. Like yourself, I adopted using flac. A computer plus a decent USB DAC works nicely. No need for a 'network player'. And no need to find that I eventually hit a problem with a new filetype because a commercial 'network player' can't handle it.
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A laptop and DAC setup seems especially popular with our American cousins. Handy for students in bedsits I imagine, but inappropriate for a living room stereo in my opinion. Our computers are deliberately harnessed to our box room office. Replacing our CD player with a network audio player was pretty straightforward. One component out, another component in, job done. Only involved one extra cable for connecting to our audio network. I had previously built a BSD FreeNAS server for our audio files, but this time around decided to purchase a Western Digital NAS with Twonky pre-installed. Again, simply plugged it in to our audio network router. Turned on the player, which displayed the WD NAS, chose some music, and pressed play, just like a CD player. Looks the part, and sounds the part.
It's possible, no matter how unlikely, I could choose to change to a different format for audio replay, but to be honest I think I'm done, FLAC it is. I bought an SA-CD player to replace my CD player, but that turned out to be a pretty pointless exercise. As others head off to a world of DSD streaming, I'm going backwards. My 24-bit 192kHz albums have all been reduced to 24-bit 96kHz, and I only stopped there because my SA-CD rips are 24-bit 88.2kHz. I used to think 24-bit 48kHz was enough, but I've changed my mind again and see 16-bit 48kHz as more than adequate.
I'm more than happy with the vast majority of my music collection being CD rips at 16-bit 44.1kHz, and simply can't bring myself to buy my music collection all over again. LPs to CDs was bad enough, a third time buying thousands of downloads is a bridge too far at this stage in my life. There are plenty of CDs out there which I can pick up for £2 or £3 to keep my collection growing. Maybe I'm just too miserable to pay circa £20 for an album download. Could be a question of timing. Compared to the LPs and cassettes I was brought up with, these CD ripped FLAC files are just fine for me. Everything's relative I guess.