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High quality music server on the cheap...sort of

I bought a cheapo HP computer with Vista Basic. Ripped all my music with Media Monkey as .wav files. I've got 40,000+ tracks that take up about 1.5 TB on a Glyph professional 2 TB drive. I have dedicated power lines running to my gear so the computer and the hard drive are on their own circuit.

itunes is not up to the task of handling a large library of .wav files and will not let you add album artwork to .wav files. Media monkey is very smooth in handling music but will only work on a PC.

Output of the HP is via USB into a Benchmark DAC then into my ARC Ref 1. I have an old NEC 17" LCD computer monitor sitting on the floor that displays the album art full screen and changes with each song. I use the new apple bluetooth keyboard as my "remote" for the system. It works nicely with my PC.

I am a vinyl guy with a VPI TNT setup and have never found a CD player that I've liked but I can't stop listening to my little "server" setup. On well recorded/mastered CD's there is real music coming out of my computer! The Benchmark has gotten great reviews and it certainly is delivering in my system. I am going to get their ADC to convert some LP's.

So for around 3k you can listen to your entire CD library (I have about 3000+ CD's) as .wav files along with a nice visual display. I did have some issues ripping in MM but managed to get all my music onto the Glyph after a month of heavy lifting.

I also have a Sonos system but prefer the "hardwired" approach in my listening room.
ntscdan

Showing 3 responses by mapman

mapman's avatar
mapman
22,638 posts
 
"At this point I just can't see investing any serious money into a single disc CD player. "

Smart move going to the server with Benchmark DAC. I would expect the Benchmark synergizes well with the ARC Ref 1 to produce a musical and nicely detailed sound, no?.

HAven't had time to investigate software for managing music on a server. Will need to check out Media Monkey.
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,638 posts
 
VEry nice. Thanks for sharing your music server architecture.

My only question is are the .wav files lossless, in other words are all the bits that can be extracted from the source stored and not compressed in a lossy manner?

If not, and everything is working together as it should, I'd say your golden. I may follow down a similar path sometime soon.
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,638 posts
 
Ntscdan,

One other thing is to make sure you create a backup of the files on your computer drive periodically to some kind of archivable media in case the disk drive(s) should die unexpectedly. You don't want to have to transfer everything again from scratch in that case, do you?

Also, don't get rid of the source disks used to feed the server. IF all else fails and you lose files, you will still need these, unless you are willing to accept the risk of data file loss otherwise.

The only thing that stops me from going to a server ASAP is that I have a lot of good material on vinyl. I can record these to digital, but the process requires attention to execute and is also time consuming.
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