JjR Posted October 13, 2004 Share Posted October 13, 2004 I have had some real good luck saving some of my albums and cassettes into mp3 format and storing them on my Creative Zen Extra Player. The sound is ok for me and I'm not using my albums everytime I want to listed to somthing. Now I'm wondering if there is a actuall home unit that works on AC with a hard drive that I can store my music in and just leave hooked up to my stereo? Is there such a animal? TIA 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scriven Posted October 13, 2004 Share Posted October 13, 2004 Yes, I think it is called a "PC". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony Reed Posted October 13, 2004 Share Posted October 13, 2004 How about a digital jukebox? I have a Hercules PD. It works pretty good. Tony Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JjR Posted October 13, 2004 Author Share Posted October 13, 2004 Joke a PC right I guess that is how I'm writing this through a PC! I have a PC and can play music through that but I would rather play the music through my Mac 4100 into the Heresy's 1 speakers. The Nomad Zen Extra suprisingly sounds very nice. I just hate the hassle of plugging in the charge it all the time. The MP3 Home unit mentioned below is not really what I was looking for as you have to load it from a CD instead of my computer which is time consuming. I guess technology has not ventured into what I'm looking for yet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daddy Dee Posted October 13, 2004 Share Posted October 13, 2004 ---------------- On 10/13/2004 12:27:57 PM Tony Reed wrote: How about a digital jukebox? I have a Hercules PD. It works pretty good. Tony ---------------- Tony, That is a pretty neat looking piece of gear. Is it pretty new? Not much out there on the internet about it. Only sites I find are www.mp3mall.net and another site in the UK. Where did you run across yours? Does the CD quality sound as good as CD? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daddy Dee Posted October 13, 2004 Share Posted October 13, 2004 ---------------- On 10/13/2004 12:27:57 PM Tony Reed wrote: How about a digital jukebox? I have a Hercules PD. It works pretty good. Tony ---------------- Tony, That is a pretty neat looking piece of gear. Is it pretty new? Not much out there on the internet about it. Only sites I find are www.mp3mall.net and another site in the UK. Where did you run across yours? Does the CD quality sound as good as CD? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JjR Posted October 13, 2004 Author Share Posted October 13, 2004 Wow I just saw this! It looks just what i'm looking for. It looks like the unit can be downloaded through a firewire from your USB port. 120gb that is sure a lot of music! The only negative I can see at this point is the price. I suspect that the sound should be as good as my Creative Nomad Zen Extra! http://mp3mall.net/mp3/MP3_Player/Home_MP3_Player/Digital_MP3_Jukebox/Dension_DMP3_A2_120_120GB/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AnalOg Posted October 13, 2004 Share Posted October 13, 2004 I believe This is the answer to your all your problems! http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/ Tom Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JjR Posted October 13, 2004 Author Share Posted October 13, 2004 Wirless would do my no good as I still have to use my Zen player. That is what I'm trying to get away from. Also another thing about these wireless units many of them do not cover the full frequencies that the unit puts out. You may be missing some bass or highs. I found this out when I way thing about a wireless transmitter to me used on my motorcycle. So its worth it to really check out the different brands. I know nothing about the spec's of the Apple as I do not use there equiptment. My Zen sits next to the receiver so a wireless would do little good anyway. Thanks 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrWho Posted October 13, 2004 Share Posted October 13, 2004 the point of the wireless would be to just play the tunes right off your pc. The airport express is a fricken amazing piece of equipment. You will experience no signal degradation from mp3's and redbook audio sounds just as nice (there are minor levels of compression). I have heard the airport device in many setups, both good and bad and it never failed to sound good. Nevertheless, there are many other alternative methods to the airport express. One of which uses the ground plugs on your AC outlets...basically you have a transmitter and any number of recievers and your sound gets sent through the ground of your house to the reciever device and then into your sound system. As far as a harddrive that you load up and play music from, the only such devices that I know of are used in recording studios and are rather limited in their playback capabilites (as far as using it like a cd player goes). Other than that, there's nothing really on the market. Can't you use your Zen player while it's plugged into the charger? If not, then I'm pretty sure there are other mp3 players that do. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony Reed Posted October 14, 2004 Share Posted October 14, 2004 Dee, My digital jukebox was given to me by a friend who works at Sharper Image, which is where he got it. It has a 20 meg hard drive. That doesn't sound like much, but in MP3 format, that's quite a bit of music. The sound seems to be very close to CD quality. Tony Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JjR Posted October 14, 2004 Author Share Posted October 14, 2004 I do not want to play anything from my PC as it is downstairs. If I wanted to change somthing that would mean I would have to go dowwnstairs to do it. I have the charger hooked up to the Zen , the problem is that you can not leave the charger on all the time when the unit is not playing. Plus the extra wires. So I the reason that I asked in the first place is if there was a AC HD unit that would do basically the same thing. That I could leave hooked up to my receiver and free up the Zen. Plus it would look nicer than just having the charger wires and Zen laying there all the time. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunnysal Posted October 14, 2004 Share Posted October 14, 2004 If I understand your needs (and I may not) there are quite a few choices out there from mid to high priced. the VRS music server is one of the current high-end offerings: http://www.vrsaudiosystems.com/products.html Linn of scotland offers another high-end unit: http://www.linn.co.uk/spec_sound/product_display.cfm?ProductID=136&activeNavBar=products&activeSubNavBar=knekt&CFID=1767456&CFTOKEN=983220 Lower down in price you can look at this (and he's a b-board member!: http://www.mbsdar.com/ This one is popular in england I am not sure if it can be bought in the USA: http://www.imerge.co.uk/products/improductshtml/ipmain.html check these guys out: http://www.sonos.com/ http://www.request.com/us/ http://www.lansonic.com/ http://www.elanhomesystems.com/products/via/viadj.asp from onkyo (Yamaha offers something almost the same called the MCX1000 MusicCAST as does Marantz, the DH9300 Digital Music Server): http://www.onkyousa.com/model.cfm?m=MB-S1&class=Digital%20Music&p=i Are those something like what you are looking for? there are about a dozen more I know about, it all depends on features and quality, price points vary from $2,000 and up...of course this can all be done with new media center enabled PCs as well, check out HPs media cetner PCs...regards, tony Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
justin_tx_16 Posted October 14, 2004 Share Posted October 14, 2004 YOu could get the new iPod and get the remote control. I have the 30gb iPod (the new one is 40gb) and a remote control I got for like $30 that works via IR and is wonderful. Use teh docking bay to get a line out that has sound untouched by any internal volume alterations. The iPod can be plugged in all the time and stores music in formats from MP3, WMA, AAC, and lossless... It has better sound quality than any other consumer portable audio player around. I know you already have a Creative Zen, but that was just bad timing . I love my iPod, all 30gb's of it. Even still though, if you want to spend the money, a stand alone player is the way to go simply because of storage. My music collection spans over 70gb's now. (AAC encoding is better than MP3 just FYI, I do normally 192 AAC when I used to do 256-320 MP3). The only problem is navigating 40-70gb's of music on a little tiny screen with a remote control. That is where you want to go with something like AirTunes. There are products out by other companies (the ScreenSavers typically do a run down once a season on thse products) that use WiFi to send out music and still allow a remote control to the base station. (so you don't have to go upstairs to switch songs, etc) This allows you to actually, intelligently, navigate your music froma computer, but still control it from a remote control, two floors down. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JjR Posted October 14, 2004 Author Share Posted October 14, 2004 No I do not need another MP3 player. I'm extremely pleased with the Zen which also happed to be actually rated as better sounding than the Pod. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JjR Posted October 14, 2004 Author Share Posted October 14, 2004 No I do not need another MP3 player. I'm extremely pleased with the Zen which also happed to be actually rated as better sounding than the Pod. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Habla Posted October 15, 2004 Share Posted October 15, 2004 Ok, I have to chime in. I have a Rio Karma, and it works like a charm. I know you said you don't want another mp3 player, but this mp3 player is all that and more. It has a dock, which means you don't have to put the power cord in every time, you just put the unit in the dock. The dock has line level rca outs on the back, ethernet, usb, and usb 2.0. Also, ther dock has a light that can pulse to the music, or just stay on. Plus, the unit is A LOT more portable than your current player. It is also the only player to sport gapless playback, which means seamless Dark Side of The Moon (something the iPoop cannot do). It has a 5-band parametric eq w/ 3 custom settings and about ten presets. This baby supports WAV, FLAC, MP3, WMA, and OGG. 20gb of storage, dock, excellent features, great ease of use, how could you go wrong? By the way, I do own one http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/shop/_templates/item_main_Rio.asp?model=261 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Griffinator Posted October 15, 2004 Share Posted October 15, 2004 ---------------- On 10/13/2004 3:59:14 PM JjR wrote: Wow I just saw this! It looks just what i'm looking for. It looks like the unit can be downloaded through a firewire from your USB port. 120gb that is sure a lot of music! The only negative I can see at this point is the price. I suspect that the sound should be as good as my Creative Nomad Zen Extra! http://mp3mall.net/mp3/MP3_Player/Home_MP3_Player/Digital_MP3_Jukebox/Dension_DMP3_A2_120_120GB/ ---------------- Ummmmmmmmmmmm You contradicted yourself. You can't download through a firewire from USB. They're two totally different interfaces.... That said, if you really care about the sound quality, you'll spend the short dollar on a cheap PC (you don't need anything fast to just play MP3's - hell, a Pentium II would work - you can get a box for under $400) and a little medium dollar on a good DAC (I use an Alesis AI3 coupled to an EMU 1212 soundcard - total cost $600) and plug that into your home system. Net result? Much better sound than you'll get out of some crappy headphone-jack-to-RCA-connection box. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J M O N Posted October 15, 2004 Share Posted October 15, 2004 Check with Dave Mallet, he's got what you're looking for: www.mbsdar.com He goes by Mallet on this forum. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maxg Posted October 15, 2004 Share Posted October 15, 2004 Just as an alternative way of looking at the issue I too was looking at portable MP3 players (or fixed ones - for use in the stereo). To date I have ripped 20 Gb of music to my hard drive on my computer and am about half way through my CD collection. Through a series of happy accidents (well documented on this forum) I discovered that my DVD player will play back MP3 on DVD disks. That is (currently) 4.7 Gb of music per disk - or about 40 albums at 256 kb/s. I am now looking at picking up a dual layer DVD burner (as long as I can find software to support it) that would give me 7.65 Gb per disk - or I guess something in the range of 65 albums. Not to put too fine a point on it I would be willing to bet serious $$$ that the sound coming out of this setup would blow away any portable player - with the added advantages of: 1. Minimum investment required. Actually thus far the investment has been 6 DVD +RW disks of which I have used 4. I already had a DVD burner and a DVD player capable of MP3 on DVD playback. Even if I did not players that do what I want can be found for $80 and burners for around $50 (at least $70 less than the cost of a portable player). 2. Unlimited storage. Just buy more DVD+RW's (or -r,-rw,+r according to your burner's needs). DVD+RW's are actually the most expensive of the range of choices over here but even these I can find for $2.50 or less. 3. Additional functionality - remember this is a DVD player - support for CD, DVD, pictures and all that. If you want to go posh you could pick up the new Pioneer all in one player (model 578?) that will do all this plus SACD and DVD-a. 4. Sound quality improvements. Aside from the issue of cabling (use standard RCA's rather than din plug to RCA converters) some of these DVD players do weird and wonderful stuff with sound. Mine, by happenstance, upsamples the sound to 192 Kb/s - 24 bit - makes a big difference. The only drawback I have come up with 2 date is that you have to have the TV on to navigate the disk. I dont mind that too much - as long as I remember to mute the TV. Since my initial posts on this subject I have now tried 4 modern DVD players, aside from my own (as in bought in the last year). 3 would not read the disks (one wouldnt read DVD+RW and the other 2 didnt understand MP3 on DVD) and 1 read them rather better than my own unit - displaying on screen not only all the song details but also the album name the album art, a graphic equalizer type display of the sound and a host of other info on the MP3 itself. That unit sells for $80 - but lacks the upsampling of mine so it doesnt sound as good. Aside from that Tony finally made it round to my house to give it a listen. It was funny listening to his comments as I played one album after another. This was a bit thin, that was fine, the other was off, the image and soundstage were fine etc. etc. His conclusion was that it was no match for my TT for classical. Huh? You were comparing the sonics to vinyl?? Dumkopf - we are supposed to be comparing to CD!! Oh its fine in comparison to the way this unit plays CD - in other words - a winner. 40 albums of convenience on a single disk - and sonics one can easily live with. that will do for me! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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