"Keith G" wrote in message
...

"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....

Perhaps my experiences may be of interest. I have been a music lover and
Record/CD collector all my (rather long) life - and like to regard myself as
an audiophile. About a year ago I was persuaded to explore the advantages
of storing my large music collection on my PC and listening via a media
player. I haven't looked back since! Listening to music has never been so
easy and so enjoyable for me. Comments on my system are listed below:

* The media player I use is a Squeezebox made by Slimdevices Inc. See:
http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_testimonials.html for some testimonials. This
is a wonderful box controlled by open source Slimserver software which runs
on your PC. It is high quality, robust, reliable and extemely easy to use.
The PC is in a separate room and connected to the Squeezebox by Ethernet or
WiFi.

* After careful listening tests I have found that, for me (and everybody
else that I know), digital audio at 192Kbps and above is indistinguishable
from the original CD. I have therefore ripped my CDs and LPs to mp3 at
192Kbps.

* My music library currently consists of over 7500 music tracks and
occupies about 55Gb. The library is backed up to three other hard drives
(large external USB2 hard drives are readily available for about £100)

* It is essential to ensure that the mp3 tags are properly organised into
Title, Artist, Album, Genre etc. so that the powerful browsing and searching
facilities in the Squeezebox can be used effectively. This will require
good tag editing software. The best I have found is DrTag, see:
http://www.drtag.de/en/ In my experience tags on commercial CDs are
invariably full of errors and spelling mistakes. It generally takes me
about 20 minutes to rip and tag a CD. It takes about 45 minutes to rip,
split into tracks and tag the music from an LP - this is additional to the
playing time of the LP since this is a real time process. A good audio
editor is required, I use CoolEdit (which has now been acquired by Adobe and
sold as Adobe Audition). Incidentally there is a very large supply of high
quality music in all genres available (free of charge) from the
alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.* newsgroups. I use Forté Agent to retrieve these
binaries.

* In summary I am now able to relax in my favourite armchair with the
Squeezebox remote at my hand and, within seconds, select the music to suit
my mood played through my hifi system in effectively CD quality. Nirvana!