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I would look for a solution that makes it easy to locate and play a particular song, supports playlists, and is flexible enough to scale to many CD's. So far I have not been that impressed with any unit on the market simply from the standpoint of locating music content. Creative Labs has a nice gadget that beams music information onto its own dedicated remote which has a small LCD screen.
I would also go out and say that I have not been impressed with 802.11g. I run a wired/wireless Linksys network at home and the signal quality between my server and the wireless nodes is not great. Sure, good enough, but not 'good' (large house, server located in bunker room :-), silly Linksys issues)
I would seriously invest(igate) in a media PC located at the media center. If you have enough computer pieces around it can be built inexpensively, and added onto as needs arise. Connect *that* over 802.11 if needed, but otherwise it would be running all its music from the local drive. If one has 1000 CD's or more, the cost of the media PC would be nothing compared to the cost of the content. Plus, one could do a TiVo and video player for very little added cost. For extra credit, one could do things like multi-zone systems where a single media PC with *multiple* sound cards could send different music to different parts of the house (with a multichannel amp system and whole house distribution system).
So, to summarize, don't worry too much about sound quality, worry more about ease of getting to your music, think wireless only if you can get good signal from your machine to the media area, and finally look into a media PC system (The Asus Pundit is a good example of what can be done inexpensively, easily under $500 with a good CPU, large disk drive, etc).
posted by 24.208.200...
, Sun, 29 Aug 2004 20:51:15
, Sat, 28 Aug 2004 12:01:18
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