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Elwood: It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark... and we're wearing sunglasses. Jake: Hit it. Jake: We're putting the band back together. Mr. Fabulous: Forget it. No way. Elwood: We're on a mission from God.

My uncle was over last night for a couple of beers. I had some vinyl spinning on the player. When it ended he say he didn't even realize it was a record. That's when you know things sound pretty good. Well besides your own hearing and enjoyment

Yep Chuck she got up at 2:00 am to drive to the airport, catch her flight at 3:30 and a layover in Charlotte. Picked her up at 9:00 chatted a bit, walked Jake, and tucked her in for a nap. She was delighted with the flowers and decorations and I am pleased she is here for a few days. Maybe a late lunch around 2:00 and then see what the afternoon brings Hope everyone has a great weekend! Cheers Gents

OK...I will go second. Thebes. He is either the brightest person I have ever "met" or so obtuse that he just appears to be so.

Glad your LF made it back safely--hope her trip was a blast (how could England not be).

That's great.

I sure hope not

I really missed a lot of good stuff from you guys yesterday afternoon and evening. Please consider all of it as getting a 'like' from me. Got tied up working most of the time. May have to face the madding crowd today and shop some more. If any of you are skiers or wanna be, it's a good time to take it to Colorado. Our central mountains are getting 1 to 2 feet of powder. Pretty incredible stuff. As usual, Denver metro gets off easy. Tarheel ... did LF make it back yet? Have a great day guys.

Thats nice to know as I will be heading out after my coffee to do some shopping.

On the third cup of some generic hazelnut carmel stuff. Going to make a 120 mile round trip through Atlanta today to my "local" service tech. My beloved dirt cheap CL find from a couple of years ago, a Pioneer SX-9000, dropped the left channel in July and then the right channel in September. It is time to get it serviced (it has never been serviced before) and show it some love. I hear this will be the biggest shopping day of the year--Super Saturday. Oh boy . . . road rage!

When I looked at the first sentence of the thread, I thought it said "Who would you most like to meet in PRISON".... The answer is, of course, no one.....except maybe Amy.....no....bad, bad....

Just wanted to say, I am having coffee right now which is nothing unusual, except it's with Duggans which I only use on occasion. Thank You Mark

One of my ongoing life hobbys has been CCTV, iv rented some things in the last 30+ years that no one would go up on.

Intro I'm by no means an expert on any of this. If you want to experience some information overload, just google "digital audio" or become a member of the computeraudiophile.com forum. I'm not going to spend any time in this thread arguing on the merits of a particular media format or gear choice. What I'm presenting has proven to work for my needs and budget. The concepts are universal, so don't get hung up on brands or cost. I also don't wish to dive into moral, legal, or philosophical debate about media acquisition. There are numerous methods for getting what you want, and I use a little bit of everything. Feel free to ask questions and I'll do the best I can to help. Everything I've chosen has at least a week of research behind it and all of the DIY stuff has a month or more in setup and tweaking. I've walked away from the solutions presented at one time or another - sometimes out of frustration or lack of feature support. Sometimes it was just a matter of learning, and other times I needed to wait for community supported features to become a reality. In other words, you're going to have to get you hands dirty at some point if you want to save some money and go with a solution that isn't quite plug-n-play. Media Storage My first NAS was a Netgear readynas duo. Nice hardware and reliable, but I was limited in both software plugins and disk growth. I had some spare pc parts and a bunch of random hard drives, so I cobbled together a system suitable for unRAID (http://lime-technology.com/). It's not the best, but it's also not the worst and it has dramatically improved over the last 18 months. I now have it running 5x 2TB drives in the disk array with a 6th 2TB disk for data parity. What that means is that I have 10TB of usable storage space and if any one of those drives fail I can replace and rebuild with the parity data found on the 6th drive. That's good enough protection for me, especially with a healthy amount of built in tools to monitor system health and address issues before full disk failure. Multiple license tiers exist, with the only real difference being the number of drives you can have in the disk array. Plugins Why do plugins matter? Because there are data related tasks you can offload to your NAS to save time transferring files back and forth between your computer. I have: Transmission: a torrent client for downloading files directly to the array, so I don't have to move the data twice. (https://www.transmissionbt.com/) Bittorrent Sync: this provides me with a private dropbox-esque feature set to share files between my computers and ensure data privacy and resiliency. (http://www.getsync.com/) Serviio: this is a popular DLNA server and provides access to the music and movies from my Oppo BDP-93. Plex is another popular plugin, but the DLNA feature just doesn't play well with my Oppo. (http://serviio.org/) Beets: this is a tool for managing your music library and tag data. it's command line based and not for the faint of heart. it creates a database that can be queried for any data found within your music files. upon import it searches the musicbrainz database and corrects your tags. I never trust tag data and insist on files conforming to my own preferences, regardless of where I acquire my music and this helps me achieve those goals. A beets plugin for the latest beta version of unRAID does not currently exist, but it is being developed. As a result I have a backlog of new music waiting to be added. (http://beets.radbox.org/) Subsonic: this is another media streaming package, focused solely on music and for remote access. It can either transcode to mp3 at the bitrate of your choosing or stream native FLAC, depending on your bandwidth and device needs. This allows me to access my full library in the car via my phone or in the office via my web browser. Previously used tools Yate: a music tagger for mac. good tool set, slow to sync changes back to files on my NAS. (http://2manyrobots.com/yate/) mp3Tag: a music tagger for windows. a very capable tool, but again slow to synch changes back to my NAS. File management really should take place locally to the data, which is why I use beets. (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) Audirvana: music player for mac. very popular, but I didn't like the itunes dependency or lack of remote control features. (http://audirvana.com/) Vox: music player for mac. same as above. (http://coppertino.com/) JRiver Media Center: a superb application for managing music, streaming music, and local music playback. the companion app for iPads called JRemote is unmatched and the combo is a perfect solution for music playback. in my situation, however, tag changes were again slow to sync back to the NAS. It also required me to use my MacBook Pro, which serves as both my work computer and home tinkering computer. I wanted something dedicated to the system and buying a mac mini purely for playback was unreasonable for my budget. (http://www.jriver.com/) (http://www.jremote.net/)

My better half just came home and started making a chocolate chip pecan pie for dessert later tonight. Life is good!

Notice how she is ever so coy as to hide her ear lobes? I agree with those who say they've enjoyed everyone they've met. Hard to put one above another. When I first found the forum, I felt like I found a bunch of long lost brothers. Hardly anyone in my history had a clue to what Klipsch was so finding a bunch of knuckleheads who enjoy the brand as much (or more) than I do.... is like coming home.

Ya'll better buy them before they DO create them as a bona-fide home speaker. You heard it from the horses mouth that they (VOXX) want a high-margin speaker.... buy them while they are only 'medium margin'

So Earl has long hair, carries a handbag and has a set of . Nope must not be Earl in the middle.

This is what Earl looks like. I met Earl when he made a trip to West Virginia to pick up some gear. In a garage with 50 pairs of speakers he was able to pick out the two best sets, do some impromptu critical listening. He managed to pick out the flaws and then ultimately choose the best set of speakers in the place, no easy task under the circumstances. He is thoughtful, makes decisions almost instantly, and makes the right ones. In the same environment, it took me weeks to figure what all those speakers were.

Like my nog straight too. Some may say that Crown in nog would be a waste of Crown. Had some Crown with ice and then some Ginger Ale.with Crown. May be overated but, pretty decent OTR. Bought a fifth of Myers Dark rum too. Would be good in nog Cheers and drive carefully if at all. Has to be enough in nog to taste the rum. CLC is certainly alright as is the Black Velvet. This from one who used to drink a little. Coffee and then I show them one more time how to get to Tampa via the bottleneck, Wildwood...

Still sleeping on a waterbed...35+ years and counting. Tried a regular bed about 20 years ago and it was like sleeping on a concrete driveway. The type we have had since is the near motionless one. Two black labs are up on it every night. They are really digging the warmth seeing as we keep the T-stat at 59 degrees on the furnace. Rarely goes on with the wood stoves going. Haven't had propane delivered in years. Been putting slippers on the foot corners of the waterbed to keep the hounds off during the day. Didn't stop Blaze the other day so I had to add a couple magazines. They are on it as i type this because they know if they get down I will put stuff on it to keep them off. Blockheads!

We had a waterbed for the first 20 year we were married, it was the cheapest bed at the time considering you could build the frame. Always had a heater but kept it a little low, can't stand to be hot trying to sleep. But I know what you are saying, had a heater die once, the bed got colder until a few days later I figured out what happened. Feels ok when you go to bed but like you said it sucks the heat out of you, I woke up stiff and could hardly move, it took all day to warm up.

I can't name all the forum members I've met without fear that I'd leave someone out. The person I'd like to meet most is the next one I meet. I, as well, have never met a forum member who I wouldn't enjoy hanging with. It's been great each time. Looking forward to April to meeting more. Could someone please say they want to meet Earl so he'll quit asking?????????????

I'd like to meet Chad, tie him up and water board him until he spills the beans and put an end to 3 more weeks of speculations.

I've met a couple of you guys, and I'm 2-for-2 in terms of good experiences. (Earl (NY) and Mustang Guy (WV)) There are several I'd like to see live and in person, but the next guy I think I'd like to meet would be Beeker.

I have 4 altogether, 13 year old triplets and a 10 year old. 2/2. I take them to concerts all the time. We've been to 6-7 in the last 6 years. My last one was Social Distortion in October.They all like Black Veil Brides, so we are going to see them in February. We were front row and got a drum stick and guitar pick handed to us from Mike Ness (Social D), and met the B-52's and Bon Jovi. Music has been the biggest thing we all do together. From playing Rock Band on PS3, to concerts,and playing musical instruments, it has been the biggest thing we have in common. In this whole new computer age thing, I can't get them into sports like I was. So the music thing is what keeps us in tune with each other.

You got that right! I didn't mention the remote switching I have to allow me to use the NBS / VRDs to Belles instead of the Pre/Pro & XPA-5 to same Belles when I want to hear the analog system being fed from the digital music but that is drifting off the OP. Sorry, back to your tutorial......

Oh lots, many of which will be in Hope next April. Get your collective asses there so this thread can become reality! Already I've met Rudy81, davis419b, CECAA850, USNRET (briefly), japosey (briefly), jtubbs6117 (briefly), and had a missed connection with pmsummer when he was visiting family in the town where I live. I've yet to walk away thinking "wow, I wish we never crossed paths" and always look forward to seeing these guys again, as I do any other regular poster around here. Even if i do think you're a self-righteous Richard - there's nothing a few Shiners can't smooth over during an in-person meetup.

Your welcome, and i just ran out this morning......dam

Please share more details with us Mr. Thaddeus, and rememba, ve have vays of making you talk... You can obtain digital music from: iTunes, Amazon, Linn, HDTracks, ripping your own CD's, or "other". You're on your own from there

Please share more details with us Mr. Thaddeus, and rememba, ve have vays of making you talk...

You just put my beer fridge to shame.

I bet that thing sounds nice. It is rated for 18Hz according to this article: http://www.paradigm.com/downloads/SS_Monitor9_CC350_ADP350_PW2200_Review.pdf Paradigm makes some of the best subs out there. I have a Paradigm DSP-3200 for daily use. I think the PW-2200 was a bit higher end than the DSP. I know it weighed about 15 lbs more.

Beets looks cool. Definite must for the OCD music person. That's me. For instance, I went through all of my Rolling Stones digital collections and put the proper album cover for each song. Many of them had covers for stuff like the best of the stones CD, etc. I want the correct album cover showing based on the ORIGINAL recording, not some newfangled thing. Metadata is always crap, and needs modified. Although Beets looks like it has a bit of a learning curve, it does look to be an excellent tool. My ISP guy got on me for using Torrents. It was actually my son. He said our bandwidth was out of sight and it was likely a torrent. It turns out he was right. YMMV, but be careful with the settings. I think many install in open sharing mode, which could cause a lot of upload bandwidth. ISP's seem to care more about that than the download bandwidth. The file server looks very robust. Are you using hot-swap drives? You probably know this already, but I will say this for others. Get a spare or two and shelf them. Many times the drive must match exactly, and after a year or so, matching drives get hard to find. Having one or two in a box brand new can save aggravation, and if it takes a long time getting a swap from a vendor, you risk losing another drive, thereby risking the entire array.

Good FRIDAY afternoon Gang Nonstop Refurb on the gun safe project, and now DONE, (One day soon i hope to be able to put someting in it) Reffer/Humidor Stocked for the evening. Really want to crank some tunes, however with the Wacco Nam Vet on edge with impending wife problems, i think it wise NOT to push my luck

Stocked and ready for Friday night. Lagavulin W/Corona Chaser will do for the evening, Robusto Maduro sounds good

Rats!...even further. Maybe I can get my flight changed. I bet the Evan Williams nog is good, eh?

I think the Royal Crown was at billbob's house tnr.......but feel free to stop by here for some small batch Evan Williams and nog. A beautiful day here in the Tarheel state (seriously that's what we are referred to). Sunny and 56 degrees. Yard guy did a bang up job on the yard and I gave him a nice Christmas tip. Cleaned the house and bought flowers for the LF.....you know that scores points So tomorrow I'll have coffee with you guys and then head to the airport to meet here flight at 9:00 am. Keep those guitars well oiled......duders getting the band back together

Honduran coffee roasted in Indiana . . . interesting. I may be stating the obvious (or maybe not)...but coffee is not typically roasted at it's source, as it would have a much, much shorter lifespan if so. (I know nothing of Folgers and the like...) Whole raw beans are shipped then roasted closer to the point of sale, so yea, my local guy gets stuff from all over the world then roasts it here in Bumscrew Indiana..... Folgers... It's the richest kind...

I always keep some "buzz beans" (chocolate covered coffee beans) around the house.

Hey......duder is getting the band back together! I'm out of "likes" already Heading out for breakfast with two other old geezers at 7:30. Rhetor when you mentioned a fashionable limp I pictured "Chester' in one of those old westerns.....Gunsmoke? Steve between you and my LF you have a total of 16 guitars! Yikes! dtel.....when I get haircuts my friends say which one did they cut? Mostly just trimming split ends. Jake ate and is back in bed.....third day of his diet. Went to the dog park and he had a good time. So did I. A young, long legged lady wearing black leggings was a treat to watch. She was throwing a ball for her dog "Rosebud" and every time the dog brought it back she would have to bend over to pick it up You never get too old to look Cheers Gents

Do tell, WHO??? Off-topic. Who we DON'T want to meet is another thread.

So then would I be able to use the external drive by itself if I were to hook it up to my AVR? And if I don't use it that way, what would I need to add in to the set up in order for the system to access the music from the WD Drive once transferred while hooked up to my computer?Does te external drive then become "the cd" with everything else staying the way it is? The DAC is a USB hookup going from the computer to the RCA outs which would go into the amp. If the music is put on the external drive which also is a USB, how do I get them all to go together? It looks like if I set it up with what I have,something will be left out as I would have 2 USB's going into the computer for each (DAC/EXTERNAL DRIVE). Will they recognize each other? Or is there something else that needs to be added into the mix. Unfortunately, being 46,I didn't grow up around computers. It was more sports for me and taping things onto cassettes, then recordable cd's or listening to vinyl. I had one system I bought in 1998 that I kept up until last year,albeit the receiver WAS the top of the line back then, and I had my cd player, tape deck, turntable, and rear projection TV with a set of KSB 3.1's and 1.1's. So back then I knew more than most of the people did, but now, I'm lost. Hope I'm not too much of a pain.

Tile is under way.

Wow.....I've been incredibly blessed to be married to the most amazing woman for the past 18 years and have 4 incredible children together. For us, divorce isn't an option....period. Youthman...phone! It's your wife's lawyer.

that's a technical term…

I think Crown Royal would be good too.....but I'm old enough to remember Royal Crown Back from breakfast.....cook knows us well. If we ask for two eggs he gives us three and doubles up on the hash browns. Drinking a third cup. TGIF! Been capping the night off with a spiked egg nog quite often this week and likely every night through New Years. Had CC (Canadian Club whiskey) last week. Is that the official whiskey of this thread? Tried Black Velvet...pretty smooth. Last night finished the bottom of a bottle of Christian Brother's brandy from last year. Was only using brandy last year, but I think whiskey is even better in them. Crown Royal in egg nog? Man, I am going to Tarheel's tonight! I love Crown Royal. Don't worry, I'll get out before the LF arrives. If you did indeed mean Royal Crown, I'll unpack my bags. I hear rum is pretty common in nog too. Kind of drifted away from rum, but I bet Captain Morgan's would be pretty tasty in nog. Always sad in mid January when the egg nog disappears from the stores. Anyone have a good family recipe?

Max2, I like the way your room looks now in an audiophile kind of way. Probably not high WAF but this your ManCave(attic) Whose acoustic panels are those? Or did you make them?

Good looking wood, rough cut Red Oak is one of my favorites. My friend cut down a giant Red Oak in his yard (beetles) and we hauled to a sawmill. I planed it for him and he gave me enough to build an entertainment center, beautiful wood.

Thanks guys. I know he appreciates it. He originally was trying to hold off until after building my front wall but the pain is getting really bad. He needs to get it done now before there is any permanent damage.