I know this is a little OT for SOS but I wonder if anyone could offer me a little advice regarding a Network Audio Player?

My home kitchen CD player is on its last legs and I'm thinking that I may consider to step into the 21st century and replace it with a media player. If I do I could take the opportunity to clear out the living room of many hundreds of CD cases and plug an Audio Media player into my Hi Fi amp. This would initially run alongside my CD player and eventually replace it.

The idea is to rip FLAC files starting with my most played CDs and progress from there.

Are Media Players like the Marantz NA7004 of comparable quality to a decent CD deck? The kitchen unit is easy enough, there are a 1001 reasonably priced units that will do for this, but I haven't delved into the consumer audio market in such a long time that I have no idea how good the Hi Fi component version of these boxes may be or at what price point. I figure that they ought to be relatively cheap compared to a CD deck as they have no drive mechanism?

I'm hoping that I can avoid having to delve too deeply into hifisnakeoil.com as I'm afraid I may end-up spending £200 on a special marker pen to draw round the edge of my interconnects or something.

Cheers

A.

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Andi, www.thedustbowl.net Mixing, Mastering, Audio Editing at The Dustbowl Audio

I've been using a Logitec Squeezebox for years now (so many years, it wasn't even a Logitec company when I bought it - it was Slim Devices).

The originals are not sold any more, but the modern equivalent is this http://www.logitech.com/en-us/speakers-audio/wireless-music-systems/device s/squeezebox-touch

Even the old one I've got works a treat - it will (wired or wirelessly) stream mp3, flac, ape etc. As you rip at the PC end and your PC can take its time to get it perfect then (in theory) this should make it sound better than a CD player from a transport point of view as all of the error correction isn't needed - if you use Exact Audio Copy, it'll tell you if it ripped with errors or not....

The bit that may or may not sound as good as your current CD player is the back end - the converters may be up to the job in your mind or might not.... Fortunately, they squirt out digital as well so you can wire it into your prefered outboard DAC if you're of a mind to do so, but my old ears have been fine with the analogue outs from the Squeezebox

These days, you can also drive it from an iPad or iPod Touch / iPhone etc as there is an app called iPeng which makes driving the thing from your armchair a dream.

Once you've got the collection ripped to your PC and one of these in the living room it is difficult to go back to CD - the beauty of not having to get off your bumcakes if you fancy something else on is something that you get used to very quickly

got a sonos system here for years: two zp80's. Reason for going the
sonos road for me was the user-interface which is fantastic. Sound
quality wise: you can use spdif out and connect to a DAC (i have one connected to an RME fireface UC), but also the analogue out is good (enough for me): goes straight into monitor controller and then a set of Genelec 1030's.

Sonos is more expensive: as said, i bought it for the great user interface (as thatś the only thing of the system you will interact with), but probably today (with the smart phones etc) many more (as the logitech mentioned above) will be close/similar in this respect to the sonos.

IMO, you get into the hifi-snake-oil territory once you're paying 1000+ for such a system (Linn, Naim etc.)

Thanks folks, I seem to recall that the Squeezebox gets a namecheck in Bob Katz' book - I'll take a look at that.

A.

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Andi, www.thedustbowl.net Mixing, Mastering, Audio Editing at The Dustbowl Audio

+1 on Sonos. I've got a ZP120, 2x S5 (now called: Play:5) and 1xS3 (now called PLay:3)...marvelous. I've got all my CDs ripped in FLAC on a NAS, utter joy.

To be honest though, these days, for the convenience and the sheer amount of music available, I mostly stream via Spotify and Napster. Lately there have been some Spotify/Sonos issues, but as far as I can tell, this has been resolved now.

You can play different songs via different players, link all, link some etc. Really good, and as mentioned very user friendly.

Quote Fien:

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IMO, you get into the hifi-snake-oil territory once you're paying 1000+ for such a system (Linn, Naim etc.)

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I wouldn't spend that much on anything short of an interconnect.

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Andi, www.thedustbowl.net Mixing, Mastering, Audio Editing at The Dustbowl Audio