External Wireless Hard Drive and USB Connectivity to a Receiver

[manbehindthecurtain]

Hello all,

 

I recently purchased an external hard drive to serve as data backup for my laptop, as well as central, networked, storage for my ripped music collection, that I sometimes play on my laptop and sync to my phone. I usually only listen to music via cd when at home.

 

I have a home theater set up that I am mostly happy with in terms of sound quality given the size of my listening room, including a Marantz sr8200 receiver and connections to my dvd and cable box, amplifier, and cd player.

 

The hard disk I have is an iomega wireless hard disk, which is connected to my wireless router, and has served my data storage needs nicely. However, I am curious if I can make use of the additional USB port on the drive to play music files through my sound system if I had a new receiver, or if this can only be done with a dedicated off the rack music server. My objective would be to use my laptop as the control and play device if connectivity and data access can be achieved.

 

Additionally, I am interested to hear recommendations on receivers that offer this level of connectivity. I see that the Marantz 7500 offers ethernet connectivity, however I do not see how this would work in my case, as the ethernet port on the hard drive is already in use to connect to the wireless router.

 

Thank you very much for your thoughts,

 

[souptin]

1. Replace your receiver with one that can connect to your network, either wirelessly or via ethernet to your router. You'll need some networking know-how to make this work, but when it does your new receiver will be able to see the music on your networked drive. I don't think you'll be able to use the usb connection to the disk simultaneously with the ethernet connection (but you won't need to in this configuration anyway).

 

2. Keep your existing receiver, and get a dedicated music server to add to it (Sonos & others?). Again you will need to connect this to your home network so that it can make use of the networked drive.

 

3. Keep your existing receiver, and get a streamer to add to it (Airport Express, Squeezebox, others?).

 

1 & 2 are the expensive options, also I suspect they'll need more setup work to make everything communicate nicely. If you're a Mac user I'd recommend giving and Airport Express a try first, using a mini toslink to toslink cable to connect to the receiver.

 

On the other hand, if you're really keen on getting a new receiver, then forget about the Airport Express and start researching UPnP and receivers. Hopefully someone else will have suggestions - I have no experience at all in this area.