Online radio/subscription svcs/home devices

Hey all,

Longshot that any of you are still around from the late 90s when I used to post on this board incessantly, but are you? Nathan? Maddy? Marty? And of course, Seth? And all the rest? (You can all blame me for starting the first "Hey Seth" thread, back in 1998, methinks.)

Anyway, from time to time, I think of a question or comment to add to this board, but I haven't had a strong enough motive to retake the plunge until now.

I am seriously considering unloading my thousands upon thousands of CDs and vinyl LPs and subscribing to a service like Rhapsody or Napster instead where I can play any song or album from their library an unlimited number of times for a monthly fee. (Of course I'll have to keep some of my CDs and albums because they don't have everything- far from it.)

So my question is: There are devices to enable the listener to hear the music from these services on his/her home music system, so you don't have to just hear the music on your computer's speakers. Sonos and Squeezebox are probably the most popular. But before I invest in those devices ($1000 for Sonos, for example), I'd like to get an idea of the sound quality.

So does anyone have any experience with them? Given an actual CD and the Rhapsody/Napster version of the same album, do they sound the same? Are they close? If the subscription service produces inferior sound, where exactly are the deficiencies?

Thanks a bunch for any and all input. Just wrapped up a week of traveling for four concerts and I'm beat! (Peter Hammill locally, Mark Kozelek in Baltimore, the Cure in NY, and NEARfest (Banco were phenomenal) in Bethlehem, PA)

hey welcome back!

I believe only econo aka thirsty moore are the few remaining members from the dark ages of this forum…

off the top of my head and the only service I truly use is emusic….. subscription service for monthly downloads use it or lose it… no current major label artists, but lots of important indie labels

plus lots of artists are getting control of their back catalogs so bands like mighty lemon drops, boo radleys, cactus world news, etc are available via emusic. as is 4ad and beggars music groups.

more later….

Yes welcome back. I was a lurker back then. Now I post too much.

So, there are many devices out now that take your digital collection on a computer and broadcast them through your stereo. Some are well known (Xbox 360, AppleTV) other are brand new (HP Media Connect). There are also stand alone options that allow you to store the music on the device itself and not require a computer.

What's your set up like now?

Originally posted by OscarTheWilde:
I am seriously considering unloading my thousands upon thousands of CDs and vinyl LPs and subscribing to a service like Rhapsody or Napster instead where I can play any song or album from their library an unlimited number of times for a monthly fee. (Of course I'll have to keep some of my CDs and albums because they don't have everything- far from it.)

i haven't talked to anyone who was serious about collecting music who has done one of the subscription programs … seems like it caters mostly to casual music listeners who just want convenience

i don't know much about their sound quality, but if you're concerned about quality you can go the digital route by ripping lossless or near-lossless ditigal files from CDs

Originally posted by OscarTheWilde:
So my question is: There are devices to enable the listener to hear the music from these services on his/her home music system, so you don't have to just hear the music on your computer's speakers. Sonos and Squeezebox are probably the most popular. But before I invest in those devices ($1000 for Sonos, for example), I'd like to get an idea of the sound quality.

i'm not an enormous computer geek, but i went this route: get a good computer sound card with a digital out, and just run a digital cord from your computer into your receiver … seems like you'd be paying way too much for one of those proprietary devices

I used to do what Hoya did, until the computer was removed from the room where my Home Theater system sits. The Xbox on the other hand, was already connected to the system. I'm also the computer geek that Hoya is talking about.

So I'm going a slightly different route. But I have a meeting and will explain what I did when I return.

good sound card + running cable to your stereo is an excellent way to go, assuming your stereo has a digital in and a computer is reasonably close by.

if you happen to have a mac mini sitting around, and i mean who doesnt, it fits nicely next to the tv and has a mini jack that is a digital out, you just need a cheap piece that is a mini jack to optical cable adapter, then you can run optical to your receiver, well thats what I do anyway, and while you are at it you can get an adapter to run hdmi out of the mac mini and use the tv as your display

Originally posted by sweetcell:
good sound card + running cable to your stereo is an excellent way to go, assuming your stereo has a digital in and a computer is reasonably close by.

Maybe this cable (read the reviews, funny stuff).

I'm a longtime squeezebox user and a very happy one. Sound quality is very good though many factors come in to play. The onboard DACs on the Squeezebox are very good for a device of its price (there are a few models now, one that has a fancy sonos style remote and the the regular one which is what I have). So you can connect to your stereo via analog and use the SB's DAC or connect it to your stereo via optical and use the DAC there. What sounds best depends on the DAC in your sytem, the analog stage in your system etc.

I go to my stereo via optical with great results. Most of my files are flac, apple lossless or 320 mp3's.

I don't use the streaming services and I don't know what bitrate they use but I'd imagine that using something like Rhapsody sound quality would be about the same no matter what you were using to feed the stream to your stereo with. The bitrate being the factor that pretty much limits the result. Garbage in = garbage out.

Sonos looks like a great product too, but costs 2 or 3 times as much to get started with. From a pure sound quality standpoint (i've not compared them myself) I've heard that SB trumps Sonso. Probably an easier setup on the Sonos and a more elegant interface. But I'm a huge SB fan….the server component is open source so there is a huge development community and tons of handy and useful plugins available.

Welcome back!

Hey Kozmo, I remembered you, but forgot your handle. Good to hear from you again! It's been a long time, bro! So Marty, aka Thirsty Moore (and now "Econo" I guess) is the only other regular from the '90s still here?

Glad to see some good response to my babble, and well-written (and not the juvenile nonsense you see on some other boards), just like days of old. Looks like people are still posting to this board when they/we are supposed to be working! Some things never change!

Anyway, my computer/gadgetry acumen is at the bare minimum. It doesn't progress because I really am not interested. I want instant gratification and simplicity. I am willing to pay for Sonos or Squeezebox because they're streamlined and easy. I appreciate your help, but I won't be running cables across several different rooms and my computer will be nowhere near my good stereo system.

So I'm not really asking HOW to hear online music in my living room—I'm asking what the sound quality is like when the feat is achieved.

So any Sonos or Squeezebox afficionados out there? If not, how is the sound quality when you do your soundcard, lossless or xbox thangs, whatever all that stuff means… Similar to CDs on the same equipment? Or lower fidelity? Whatever those rigs are, I suspect they will probably produce sound equivalent to what I'd get with Sonos or Squeezebox since they're all streaming audio (yes, at least I know that technical parlance!).

So I was in the same boat for about a year. I had a huge CD collection that I hadn't taken off the shelf, a few large digital collections, multiple devices (laptops, a desktop, iPods, a home theater) and multiple locations (home and work).

I'm in the process of selling my CDs to secondspin.com. I'm having mixed results and will write more about that later.

With that money, I'm buying a Home Server. Well, technically, I'm building one, but that's not important to the story.

The Home server becomes the one place I store all the music for all the devices. It has no keyboard, mouse or monitor. It simply connects to the other devices over a LAN (wired or wirelessly) and shares the library. If the wife downloads the new Coldplay from Amazon, it stores it on the server (she doesn't know it, but then again, she didn't know where iTunes stored the files anyway). The other devices automatically see it in their library and play it. It does the same with pictures and movies.

Great. So I've got multiple computers with a shared library - iTunes already does this? Well, sort of, and not as slickly. But what about my home theater?

That's where the media extender comes in. The Xbox 360, HP MediaSmart Connect and similar devices allow you to play your music (and video and photos) through your home theater system. They automatically connect to the Home Server and provide access to the entire library. I was at a bit of a monetary advantage here in that I already owned a 360.

Well, any PC with Windows Media Center can do this, so why the home server?

A few reasons, and one that was crucial to me selling my collection - automatic backup. And not just of my collections - of all of my computers on the network. I mirror two hard drives with little effort, and every few months make a copy and take it off premises (to protect against fire, flood, theft). Try doing that with 1,000 cds.

The second consideration was both space savings and energy savings. The Mrs. hated the desktop computer in the main room (and the power wasted). The server is tiny and doesn't have to power peripherals. Energy savings was also important to me (hey, I live in San Francsico…) so that's also why I'm building my own. I chose the least power consuming CPU I could find (especially on idle) and "green" hard drives that remove the heads from the drive on idle, saving nearly 25% of the wattage used on idle.

Lastly, I wanted to have access to my collection anywhere I had an internet connection. I dumped 30 Gigs from my office computer and now stream anything from my collection using theFireFly Media Server plugin for the Home Server. Unfortunately, there's no Last.fm plug in for the Server or FireFly, so if it looks like I'm listening to less music, that would be why. The reality I'm listening to more.

Originally posted by OscarTheWilde:
Anyway, my computer/gadgetry acumen is at the bare minimum. It doesn't progress because I really am not interested.

Sorry, I started blabbing before I read that. You can ignore my post.

Originally posted by pdx pollard:
if you happen to have a mac mini sitting around, and i mean who doesnt,

Then you should do this...

But don't because it won't play nicely with your other macs. Yet. But I did look at picking up a mac mini to do this and opted for the DIY variety. I just couldn't stomach wasting all those good video peripherals on the Mini…purist I guess.

Chaz, thanks for your reply. You raise some interesting questions. (I think I remember a Chaz from the old days, too. Thanks for the welcome back.)

First, are you saying sound quality is not an all or nothing deal with Squeezebox or Sonos? In other words, are you saying that whatever sound quality I initially get on my home system can be improved?

Are you saying those improvements will have no effect on what I hear through Rhapsody?

Also, it sounds like some of you are getting all the music you need online (and with better sound quality) without engaging iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, etc. Am I reading that right? Can one replace one's record collection (or a large portion of it) using sources other than Rhapsody/iTunes/Napster *with better sound quality* than those three?

Originally posted by OscarTheWilde:
Chaz, thanks for your reply. You raise some interesting questions. (I think I remember a Chaz from the old days, too. Thanks for the welcome back.)

First, are you saying sound quality is not an all or nothing deal with Squeezebox or Sonos? In other words, are you saying that whatever sound quality I initially get on my home system can be improved?

Are you saying those improvements will have no effect on what I hear through Rhapsody?

Also, it sounds like some of you are getting all the music you need online (and with better sound quality) without engaging iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, etc. Am I reading that right? Can one replace one's record collection (or a large portion of it) using sources other than Rhapsody/iTunes/Napster *with better sound quality* than those three?

Basically what I'm saying is that when using a service like Rhapsody, your sound quality will be limited more by the quality of the stream than the device being used to play it.

It could probably be improved, but home audio a sinkhole of diminishing returns…..

If you tell me more about your stereo/speakers or whatever you will be hooking the device up to I can tell you where the biggest bottleneck would be. But using my system as the example, the Rhapsody service itself would DEFINATELY be the limiting factor as far as sound quality goes.

Using a device like SB or Sonos you could do a mixture of Rhapsody and streaming files from your own PC. The files played from your
PC will sound better, but it also depends on the bitrate you rip them at.

Sounds to me like sonos may be the way to go if you're not a big computer nerd. I've never used one but hear it's an easier process.

i really don't mean to come off as condescending here, but it looks like you need some basic info on digital music… if you're thinking about making a huge switch like this and you're not really sure about the basics, i would recommend picking up a general book (i'm sure there's a "for dummies" thing out there that would work well)

that said, here's a first hack:

just think of basic A/V principles like "garbage in, garbage out" and that your audio quality won't get any higher than the weakest link in your rig

start with the music itself:

think of your CDs and vinyl as containing 100% of the audio the artist intended to record and release … the only way to replicate this with a digital/computer file is to make a "lossless" copy of the original recording … most digital files (MP3s) compress and remove data from the original recordings, this can result in sound that is tinny, or slices off the highs and lows … generally, as the digital file gets bigger in size it includes more of and sounds more like the original recording

so no matter how you connect these files to your home stereo, the best they can sound is already limited by the way they were transferred from the original recording

take that same principle and just apply it down the line to your computer hardware –> connections/cables –> stereo receiver –> speakers

Thanks for all the feedback. I knew I could count on the forum.

Speaking of which, I remember back ten or so years ago when you, Kosmo, said something on this very board like "they will have to pry my cold dead fingers off my keyboard to get me to stop posting to the 9:30 forum," so I couldn't think of a better person to have moderate it!

I also remember you were a big fan of Catatonia, especially the National Velvet album. Your ravings convinced me to get it, and it turned out to be one of my faves from the era.

Hey Marty/Thirsty/Econo—Are you here or where are you? Last time I saw you was at Natty's hipster outlet in Clarendon, 'member? So what did you end up doing after graduating? Are you still in Silver Spring? Still groovin' to Blonde Redhead and Sonic Youth?

Now back to the original message. All those embedded quotes take some getting used to. We didn't even have them back in the day. We had to copy and paste. Putting the quoted text in italics might make the message that contains them easier to read. Remember, Koz, we were always making suggestions to the forum webmaster?

Vansmack, I've had good results selling my unwanted CDs to Amazon and Half. If and when I do a subscription service, I'll be inundating them with more CDs. They sell pretty fast and you'll get about $5 to $9 for them if undamaged and still retail available. Out of print CDs of course command more. Sure beats taking them to a used CD store and getting $1 or $2 for them.

Hoya, I don't mind what you term "condescension" at all. I readily admit most of the world knows a heck of a lot more than I do when it comes to computers and gadgets.

I wanted to know if the sound from online music services when using Sonos or Squeezebox on a home system is equivalent to a CD, and it seems the answer is a resounding "No." So thanks, all, for answering my query. Now I just need to find out how deficient the sound is, and whether it's worth bagging my interminable quest for perfect sound reproduction in favor of convenience.

All that research on receivers, amplifiers, speakers, phono cartridges and styli, and buying remastered/upgraded CDs, Mobile Fidelity CDs, virgin vinyl, all that may have to go by the wayside. Maybe it'll be a relief. And then perhaps I'll get Amazon's Kindle for my books.

speaking of online radio and gadgets has anyone tried out Slacker radio? I keep bumping into stories on their portable player…

Or Chumby?

Of all the online streaming sites that allow users to upload and "share" their music, anywhere.fm is the only one I consider using at the moment. It's legal in that it claims to being paying the proper license fees.

A small part of my collection, plus recent DJ sets at the club are here http://anywhere.fm/kosmo

I think Muxtape is a grand idea but needs to get legal before I would consider using it.

Most of the others website which allow users to create playlists, leech off MP3s hosted by other sites and no have no evidence of paying artists when their stuff is used.

Originally posted by OscarTheWilde:
I wanted to know if the sound from online music services when using Sonos or Squeezebox on a home system is equivalent to a CD, and it seems the answer is a resounding "No."

well, it depends on the "online music service" you're using … if you're actually buying or renting music online i think it's next to impossible to buy/rent a lossless file … but if you convert your CDs to a lossless file (like FLAC), and then play them on your squeezebox, you'll have the "equivalent sound" to a CD

and you should actually listen to digital files compressed at different levels, you may be surprised to find that file with moderate compression (like a 320kps MP3) actually sounds really good

Hoya, the thought of taking all my CDs and converting them in any way fills me with dread. It would take way too much time and effort. That's why I just want to get rid of them and listen to them on Rhapsody. (The other reason is I'm tired of schlepping tons of boxes of them every time I move.)