Completely Lost

[markluxton]

I'm looking to set-up a home media network centered around my music collection, but I don't have a clue where to even begin. The main thing is being able to access my music from various rooms in the house, but I'd also like to be able to play the various TV shows and maovies I have, connect to the Internet and get rid of my cable box. I'd also prefer to do this with as few devices as possible. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Advice, links, etc are appreciated.

 

[darascal]

Not sure about getting rid of your cable box, but you could start by looking at Apple TV. You can wirelessly stream music & video. Need one box per room. apple.com

 

[realhifi]

There are people that do this kind of thing for a living and could sort you out in short order. Don't mean to be gruff but everyones expectations and home are so different that you could spend a lot of your (and other peoples) time just scratching the surface.

 

 

 

[wgscott]

Start by telling us what you have.

 

If, for example, you have a mac mini or iMac or something, Apple TV2 I think would be best. But with different starting assumptions, you might want to look at Sonos or something.

 

Another approach to getting audio throughout your house is to crank up the volume.

 

[Paul R]

We can probably help get you sorted enough to think about what you want.

 

What kind of music collection do you have now? CD, iTunes, Windows Media?

 

Also, do you already have stereo gear in each room, do you need to buy new gear?

 

What do you imagine you want to do? We have music all over the house here, and ours is in a state of what amounts to constant evolution. It's fun, but sometimes it can get confusing when things change, or even annoying.

 

You could of course, have a pro install everything and be done with it. I think that takes all the fun out of it, but then I rather like tinkering. And I like doing things in small enough steps that if I screw something up, it isn't too painful to back up and redo it right.

 

Depending upon the computer and audio gear you already have, you are looking at costs of anywhere from a a few hundred bucks up to the high five figures, or more.

 

Tell us what you are dreaming about.

 

-Paul

 

 

[markluxton]

I should have included more details in my original post.

 

In my living room, I currently have a pretty average Pioneer 5.1 receiver and streaming media (music: wav, mp3, flac with some similar assortment of video) from my office computer to my Xbox 360. The reason I don't like this is the noise of the Xbox, its slow response time, inability to efficiently manage my media from my living room and no web browsing. (For the networking piece, I have receivers connected to computers, all of varying quality throughout the house. I don't intend to upgrade these areas as I'm not worried about quality here so much as convenience. This part of it is an easy fix on my end.)

 

So, I'm planning to completely revamp my living room set-up and thought a computer would be the way to go. This would allow me to do all that I want through one device, add features later without having new boxes in the middle and possibly control it through an Android device. I also think it'd be a nice project to find and put together what I need to make this happen.

 

I know there are HTPCs out there, but since I don't watch a lot of movies or tv (outside of college football and hence the desire for cable), I was hoping could find something that would allow me to watch video if I wanted, but focus instead on maximizing audio quality. (I'm carefully avoiding the word audiophile as I don't consider myself that extreme. I'd just like to listen to music through a system that can show the details. I hate losing a rhythm guitar or something in the background.)

 

My thought would then be to build a computer, run the video to the TV and audio to a stereo amplifier. It's the building the computer part where I feel lost. I'm willing to learn, but I don't know what's out there so I don't even know what my options are. This sort of stuff is so fragmented right now, it's hard to find beginner information.

 

[howlingfeedback]

Your concern is building a computer for your set up if Im reading you correct, well I don,t know what you have in the US but here in in GB we have Internet sites where you can buy a Barebones system thats a computer casing with the motherboard and power supply nothing else you add the memory Graphic card sound card and so on.

 

But you will have to fit the soundcard memory sticks graphic card and a CD/DVD drive and a harddrive none of this for a beginner would be easy and could turn into a nightmare.

 

A would suggest you pick a computer manufacturer and on the website you pick the components you need they build it and for a budget price.

 

[Paul R]

In terms of storing and managing your music, iTunes is very hard to beat, especially at its list price of $0.00.

 

So start with iTunes, and I recommend given your requirements, a Mac Mini. You can start with a stock Mini.

Connect the mini to your telelvision with a DVI cable
Connect the mini to your preamp or integrated amp through a decent DAC. This is very much one's own choice, but to start on the cheap, a $149 HRT Music Streamer II and a $30 USB cable make a great place to start...
Load all our CD's and videos into iTunes using the DVD drive in the Mini. Videos get a little tricky. I usually wind up using an external device - like an Apple TV or Western Digital HD Live. Not enough information to make a sensible recommendation though, what kind of videos do you watch?

 

Now, in terms of convenience you have several choices from there. The one that may make the most sense is to load iTunes on each computer connected to a amp.

You do not have to load the library* on any of the "remote" computers. They will be able to see and use the library from the main computer.

 

From this point, you can extend many different ways, depending upon where you want to go. For example, a DAC upgrade can be magical, even though the HRT is very good indeed. Or you can replace the remote computers with Airport Express or Apple TV devices, which are easy to manage.

 

Add in an iPod Touch or iPhone for remote control, and you have a pretty sweet system, with a minimal amount of fuss, that you can expand for a long long time.

 

Of course, what I wrote above is at the 10,000 foot level. I expect there are plenty o details and questions about the situation.

 

 

-Paul

 

 

[tjw0903]

I've noticed that iTunes is recommended oo so much on this site. I, for one, am not a fan of iTunes, but can't help but fear I might be misguided and missing something. Would anyone care to share the reasoning and comparisons between iTunes and windows based player?

 

[wgscott]

On OS X, iTunes appears to be the best for organizing, browsing and searching for music, so many people who don't use it much as a player still use it for cataloging purposes. If you are ok with ALAC and other Apple-compatible file formats, it does these things reasonably well (Classical music being somewhat an exception).

 

In addition, used as music server software for zone-playing via Apple TV2 or remote-playing with Airplay, it works very well.

 

Apple's Remote.app for the iPod/iPad/iPhone requires iTunes. There aren't many viable alternatives in this regard.

 

Its primary drawback on OS X is that it can't change sample frequency output on the fly. So if Audio MIDI is set to 44.1kHz when iTunes opens, and you go to play some 96kHz music, it will downsample it on the fly. Hence the market for Audirvana, Decibel, and more expensive software. Many use these in conjuction with iTunes as a browser. Also, it is highly apple-scriptable.

 

The other drawbacks are that it is bloated Carbon legacy code with junk from OS 9, still is not 64-bit, and has all the crap needed to manage iPhones, iPods, iPads, purchases, Movies, etc. etc. that really has nothing directly to do with music playback, so there are invariably compromises made that a dedicated audiophile player doesn't have to make.

 

 

 

 

[Paul R]

As well, iTunes is:

 

100% cross platform between Windows and MacOS

 

It handles library sharing / synching very well on it's own, and there are

third party add-on programs that do it even better. Gather artwork even better, etc.

 

In terms of file formats, ALAC has no downsides compared to FLAC, and AIFF has no downsides compared to WAV. MP3/AAC should just not be used.

 

Depsite the many groans and moans you hear about sound quality being better with other programs, iTunes all by itself sounds pretty darn good.

 

With Classical music, you tend to have rip the CDs as collections, but that is pretty much true no matter what application you use to RIP them. It's getting better at dealing with it, over the last few major versions.

 

On MacOS, the higher end audio programs (at least in terms of cost) all use iTunes as a backend. That would be Pure Music and Amarra. It makes life very convienent.

 

iTunes allows you to manage and put music on your iPod, iPhone, iPad, or other device. This is a biggie to some folks.

 

If you have an iPhone, you must activate it through iTunes, and you use iTunes to back it up and restore it in case of a disaster...

 

If you have a large iBook/Kindle/etc. library, iTunes backs it up as well.

 

It's free.

 

On PC's you run into lot of irrational behavior because it is from "Apple", but truth to be told, it is probably the best library manager for media out there available to most people.

 

-Paul