I love music. My husband collects CDs like I collect books. We also have a large collection of LPs and of MP3s on our computer. I won’t even go into our magnetic tape collection. Literally, I won’t go into it. Its size frightens me. We have no plans of slowing down the growth of our collections. Unfortunately, a remarkable portion of the funds we put into our musical enjoyment (not includ...
Wow, that’s a lot of money! I wish they were cheaper.
How about a networked music player, such as the Slim Devices Squeezebox or Transporter?
http://www.slimdevices.com/
Rip all your music to a lossless format (flac, Apple Lossless, either of which eliminate the fidelity concern inherent in MP3), and your entire music library is then accessible from your stereo via the front interface of the device, or a web interface. You can play random mixes, everything by a particular artist, particular genre, set up custom playlists, hear internet radio, etc.
It’s not without flaws, mostly in the overhead to rip and correctly tag all your music, and the geek skills needed to get it set up the first time, but it’s awesome after that.
To be honest, I’ve always liked recataloging my music, and my occasional efforts to normalize my artist/album/genre tags on my ripped music satisfies that desire very satisfactorily.
They offer two different models, one of which is an audiophile quality product, and only $2k vs the $10k you mention. May not have the heirloom draw of a jukebox, but it’s seriously freaking cool.
I love mine. In fact, I have both a Squeezebox (bedroom stereo) and a Transporter (living room stereo). It’s changed the way I use my music, and the coolest thing is when I have it on random, and it plays something I forgot I had, or forgot I loved. The one in my bedroom is used every single night. Set it to sleep in an hour, choose my music, and I’m off to sleep.
For parties, I just set up a laptop and let folks choose their faves via the web interface. It is a bit embarassing if they stumble across my Air Supply stash, though.
It’s cool having access to all of my 800+ CDs on demand in either location, and it actually made room, as I could then put all the CDs in basement storage.
If I want a car CD, I just burn one, and if that copy gets damaged, so what?
Why not find an older non-working but cosmetically sound juke box and mod it with a home theater media station. That way you could hook it up to your TV, watch movies, stream audio around the house . . . plus you have a juke box sitting there.
I have heard (from a physics major at my school) that the sound quality difference between an mp3 (as long as it’s 128 or higher) and a CD is not detectable to the human ear. Most people think mp3s are poor quality either because a) they download bad mp3s (quality less than 128) or b) they have bad speakers on their computer and do not realize that it’s the speakers, not the mp3s, that are making the music sound bad.
Just a thought.. it would make your life a million times easier just to digitalize everything, back it up on external hard-drives, and then enjoy a clutter-free life.
You can hear distortion (usually sound like a phaser on the high side) with mp3s at 128KBPS. You might want to look at the SONY CDP-CX230, CDP-CX335 , or CDP-CX400, CD Changers. I am pretty sure they have larger ones out there (500 discs).
Here’s what I used:
1. Intel Mac Mini (comes with iTunes, FrontRow and a remote)
2. High quality digital-analog converter with an optical input. A typical AV receiver will work fine too.
3. A Belkin cable to hook them together
4. A 1 terabyte hard drive
5. A screen
I ripped all of my CD’s to AIFF format (uncompressed CD images) and put them all in the closet. Now I can surf my collection and it sounds just as good as my high-end CD player.
Total investment: about 1000 for the computer, cable and hard drive (I already had the DAC, add 400-600 if you need to add one).