Is it possible to stream music to a seperate hi-fi?

Lum

That person was talking about music videos (in which I include videos of live concerts and the like), I am talking about films and TV shows.

People doing this tend to have huge hard drives and either rip their DVD/BluRay collection or just watch films or TV shows from a variety of online download or streaming sites.

Video CDs were rubbish anyway. Audio CDs had just enough space for 72-80 minutes of audio in fairly good quality, cramming video on there was either going to result in a very short CD, or have terrible quality. Typically both.

googler

Fifer wrote: »

I agree. I've been using Slim Devices (now Logitech - [spits]) streaming products for over seven years and this year have started using them with the Vortexbox platform (running an HP Microserver). I couldn't contemplate going back to the inconvenience of CDs.

(I recall discussing this on forum with someone once before - if I'm repeating myself, and it was a prior discussion on the same lines with you, I apologise)

I've been using a Logitech SB Touch for a year or so, and even with it accessing a moderate library of FLAC files, it's painfully slow compared with the process of merely picking a CD off the shelf and popping it in the player.

From the main menu, select My Music, then Music Folder NOW as I type, and watch spinning wait icon, which keeps spinning for at least the time it took my to type these words, and stops NOW, and I have a list of what's in the folder. Scroll thru A-Z to find what I'm after, artist-wise, get menu with all albums by that artist, and eventually - get it to play.

Compare this with - go to shelf, knowing instinctively where everything is, sometimes recognising titles merely by colour and style of spine, grab CD, open case while crossing from shelf to player, place CD in, press play. There's NEVER any delay for the device to talk to the network, for it to consult an index on a hard drive, or any other handshaking - it just plays, first time and every time.

I defy anyone to have a tablet-controlled streaming system where EVERYTHING that the user would want to play is easily accessible with one or two presses. With any kind of menu structure comes the infuriating wait whilst you navigate the structure, whilst you wait for the electronics to catch up, etc.

Whether you organise by;

Artist, then Album, then Track OR
Track name, regardless of Artist OR
Albums in Chronological Order, regardless of Artist

The majority of what you actually want to play will be guaranteed to be at the end of the sort order, requiring lots of flicking and scrolling through menus...... even with a Search function, you have to wait while it searches, and in less than half that time, I've got the CD on and playing....

prowla

There are some very good sounding audio CDs.
(And also a heck of a lot more bad sounding ones!)

Lum

I too hate library based music databases, I have a nice folder structure that I've been maintaining for years and use playback software that presents the folder structure to me to navigate through, any attempt I've made to organise it by album or whatever is always doomed to fail, if only due to my large collection of stuff that was never on an album.

It works well since MediaPortal is actually pretty damn fast, and my home network is wired cat6, though I can see how it might be annoying on a slow ARM based device browsing the music over wireless.

I find it a lot more convenient, especially since on bad days simple things like standing up and sitting down are painful for me.


(BTW I don't really want to argue about CD quality. It's been done to death before and nobody changes their opinions as a result of such discussions)

Fifer

googler wrote: »

(I recall discussing this on forum with someone once before - if I'm repeating myself, and it was a prior discussion on the same lines with you, I apologise)

I've been using a Logitech SB Touch for a year or so, and even with it accessing a moderate library of FLAC files, it's painfully slow compared with the process of merely picking a CD off the shelf and popping it in the player.

From the main menu, select My Music, then Music Folder NOW as I type, and watch spinning wait icon, which keeps spinning for at least the time it took my to type these words, and stops NOW, and I have a list of what's in the folder. Scroll thru A-Z to find what I'm after, artist-wise, get menu with all albums by that artist, and eventually - get it to play.

Compare this with - go to shelf, knowing instinctively where everything is, sometimes recognising titles merely by colour and style of spine, grab CD, open case while crossing from shelf to player, place CD in, press play. There's NEVER any delay for the device to talk to the network, for it to consult an index on a hard drive, or any other handshaking - it just plays, first time and every time.

I defy anyone to have a tablet-controlled streaming system where EVERYTHING that the user would want to play is easily accessible with one or two presses. With any kind of menu structure comes the infuriating wait whilst you navigate the structure, whilst you wait for the electronics to catch up, etc.

Whether you organise by;

Artist, then Album, then Track OR
Track name, regardless of Artist OR
Albums in Chronological Order, regardless of Artist

The majority of what you actually want to play will be guaranteed to be at the end of the sort order, requiring lots of flicking and scrolling through menus...... even with a Search function, you have to wait while it searches, and in less than half that time, I've got the CD on and playing....

There is something wrong with your system. Mine is almost instantaneous. My Music, select album (you can navigate directly to a letter using the keyboard or using lazysearch from the remote), play, music starts. No spinning, no delay. I have around 500 albums ripped to FLAC.

Plus I can lie on the sofa and change CD without getting up, walking to the CD player, pressing eject, waiting for the drawer to open, removing the CD, going to the shelf, picking a new CD, walking back to the CD player, loading the CD, waiting for the drawer to close and the disc to spin up, pressing play then going back to the sofa. And going through that process every time I want to hear a new CD.

And of course, that presumes we are all anal retentives who keep all our CDs stacked in perfect alphabetical order. I'm not ...

Fifer

prowla wrote: »

There are some very good sounding audio CDs.
(And also a heck of a lot more bad sounding ones!)

But there are many fantastic sounding streamers.

InsideInsurance

googler wrote: »

At a HiFi show, many years ago, a rep from Pioneer or somesuch suggested to a journalist that the new breed of Video CDs were much better than standard Audio CDs because they had "pictures as well as music" (or words to that effect).

Id more wonder what on earth Pioneer were doing at a HiFi show.... ok, at Sound and Vision as they used to make great plasma screens but they've never been close to high fidelity standard with audio

prowla

Fifer wrote: »

But there are many fantastic sounding streamers.

Erm - I said CDs, not CD players.

The content of streamed material is even more variable than CDs, because you have options of different formats, including lossy ones.

As far as fantastic sounding, I guess it depends on what your definition of fantastic is...

Fifer

prowla wrote: »

Erm - I said CDs, not CD players.

The content of streamed material is even more variable than CDs, because you have options of different formats, including lossy ones.

There's not much variable about well ripped lossless files streamed to a proper good quality player.

googler

InsideInsurance wrote: »

Id more wonder what on earth Pioneer were doing at a HiFi show.... ok, at Sound and Vision as they used to make great plasma screens but they've never been close to high fidelity standard with audio

OK, it may have been Pioneer, it may have been Sony.... that's why I said "Pioneer or somesuch"

The manufacturer name wasn't the punchline of the story....