How to Play Music - Sonos and or CD Player?

Terrysdelight

Norman_Castle said:

Terrysdelight said:

I've just spoken with my son - I think I know what to do now.  Basically convert all my music to sound files within something like Itunes and then play the music through the internet.
Kind of defeats the object of being able to bang on a CD,

I've got hundreds of cds plus minidisc and vinyl and couldn't be rsed to convert it all. I also like having a music collection. All you need is something to play the cds on which most dvd players will do and a connection to the sonos. Exactly what inputs are on the sonos? Exactly how is it connected to the tv?

A quick google suggests the soundbar has an optical (toslink) input. If thats being used by the tv a dvd or cd player with optical output could be connected with the tv through one of these  https://www.amazon.co.uk/LiNKFOR-Switcher-Supports-Dolby-AC3-Compatible/dp/B07MFJKMRB/ref=pd_lpo_23_t_2/260-4144930-3777023?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B07MFJKMRB&pd_rd_r=279c677c-82af-49d3-b71d-5b663333b3d9&pd_rd_w=Q6E07&pd_rd_wg=T79Ca&pf_rd_p=7b8e3b03-1439-4489-abd4-4a138cf4eca6&pf_rd_r=2JXPQHW0SX3E5M229AXV&psc=1&refRID=2JXPQHW0SX3E5M229AXV

I think the soundbar goes into the bridge and the TV.

I feel as if I'm on the right path now - need to do a bit of research on the Sonos.   What I don't understand is, if you play a music CD, through a DVD player (which are relatively cheap <£100) - how will you get a good quality sound?  My ex-husband used to spend an absolute fortune (huge, huge amounts!) to get the sound right.   I would have thought at the very least I would have to buy a half decent CD player and then somehow or another get it connected to the Sonos. 

EssexExile

If you are listening through Sonos then the quality of the CD player doesn't really matter that much. I just have all my music on my phone then Bluetooth it to my ridiculously over specced & over priced Quad hifi.

RumRat

Mickey666 said:

Uploading everything is all very well as long as you're happy to be dependent on an internet connection to listen to your music.  Personally, I prefer to keep all my 'stuff' locally.  I'm not against cloud storage but I am against being wholly reliant on it.

Apologies, I forget that there is a minority who don't have reliable BB, but, for everyone else........Seems the OP is in the minority....
I've not played a CD in 3 years and haven't had any time that I couldn't get whatever I wanted, music wise.

Terrysdelight

Mickey666 said:

Storage is so cheap these days that it's simpler to just buy a larger hard drive for your PC.  I chose a NAS drive for flexibility but I have network wiring thoughout the house and some other special requirements, but the principle is the same.   Cloud storage simply cannot be relied upon to be available 100% of the time.   Actually, USB memory sticks are pretty cheap these days.  My music collection is around 15,000 songs and around 80GB whereas a 128GB memory stick is less than £20 so I could carry it around on my keyring with plenty of room to expand if I wanted to!

Thank you.  That sounds an excellent idea.  I have cat 6 cables everywhere - all waiting to be connected up - three years later the cables are still just hanging out of the ceiling.  If I remember rightly, the cables are to connect into a patch or a switch thing, then that connects to the router and basically makes the Sonos hardwired because it is more reliable.

TheRightOne

Terrysdelight said:

Mickey666 said:

Storage is so cheap these days that it's simpler to just buy a larger hard drive for your PC.  I chose a NAS drive for flexibility but I have network wiring thoughout the house and some other special requirements, but the principle is the same.   Cloud storage simply cannot be relied upon to be available 100% of the time.   Actually, USB memory sticks are pretty cheap these days.  My music collection is around 15,000 songs and around 80GB whereas a 128GB memory stick is less than £20 so I could carry it around on my keyring with plenty of room to expand if I wanted to!

Thank you.  That sounds an excellent idea.  I have cat 6 cables everywhere - all waiting to be connected up - three years later the cables are still just hanging out of the ceiling.  If I remember rightly, the cables are to connect into a patch or a switch thing, then that connects to the router and basically makes the Sonos hardwired because it is more reliable.

The source is most important. Your husband taught you the same.
In this case, for convenience, you can use your home PC in conjunction with http://www.exactaudiocopy.de to extract the audio.
https://www.techradar.com/how-to/how-to-rip-your-cds-to-flac

BUT, if you have some older audio CDs in your collection, they might have some with special processing that is not detected by your PC's optical drive.
Similar to the effect that was added to Vinyl, where they attenuated the low frequencies and boosted the high frequencies during the recording and Mastering process. The opposite is then applied during playback. This has the effect of reducing background during produced during the recording and Mastering process..
For Vinyl; RIAA curve/equalisation. For CD Audio; Pre-Emphasis.
A CD Audio player will detect when "Pre-Emphasis" is utilised and apply the corrective process. PC optical drives cannot.

It might not be an issue with most of your CDs. But who knows? You might have a cornucopia of collectables.

If you do, they are a few head spinning possibilities. Though perhaps the easiest is to use dBpoweramp's CD Ripper & Music Converter, as they claim to have a De-Emphasis Filter.:
http://www.dbpoweramp.com
http://www.dbpoweramp.com/Help/dMC/CDadvanced.htm
If you want free, EAC in conjunction with Audacity may be able to complete the task. But once again, none of this may be necessary if you don't have any CDs with pre-emphasis applied. The only way to tell is if the CD sounds tinny and sharp without much bass(lower frequencies).

You have a spot of reading to do going forward.

But don't rip the CDs into a lossy format. Lossless only. That way you retain the quality of the original CD.
You can then, if you wish, create lower quality versions for portable devices, from your lossless originals.
Having the music on file opens up the possibility of having your music collection at your fingertips without having to be near the CD player in order to insert an individual CD every time.
I'll send you some sample audio files for you to listen and manipulate.

avoidtheupsidedownbottles

OP stated they just wanted to listen to a few CDs, already has voice command track access via Alexa but doesn't want to have to look up track names each time.  
CDs could already play through DVD and soundbar which OP was apparently happy with in the past.  Or a single further Sonos purchase would allow the DVD to play through the Sonos network.
Spending hours and hours ripping everything (how many CDs exactly?) and moving files around from pillar to post for this apparently limited requirement sounds nutty to me.  

TheRightOne

avoidtheupsidedownbottles said:

OP stated they just wanted to listen to a few CDs, already has voice command track access via Alexa but doesn't want to have to look up track names each time.  
CDs could already play through DVD and soundbar which OP was apparently happy with in the past.  Or a single further Sonos purchase would allow the DVD to play through the Sonos network.
Spending hours and hours ripping everything (how many CDs exactly?) and moving files around from pillar to post for this apparently limited requirement sounds nutty to me.  

Sounds nutty to spend £400 on a SONOS Connect so that you can listen to a few CDs via the SONOS network. 

So advice was given on how to move forward in the 21st century. That is to digitize one's collection of music and video. This is for good reason. CD don't last forever.

According to the US National Archives, CDs and DVDs have very similar lifespans. Generally, unrecorded (blank) CDs and DVDs have a shelf-life of five to ten years. The experiential life expectancy of recorded CDs and DVDs is between two and five years, though based on manufacturer claims, ten to twenty five years, or even longer, isn’t unprecedented. In any case, using very conservative numbers will reduce the risk of losing data.

Mickey666

TheRightOne said:

BUT, if you have some older audio CDs in your collection, they might have some with special processing that is not detected by your PC's optical drive.
Similar to the effect that was added to Vinyl, where they attenuated the low frequencies and boosted the high frequencies during the recording and Mastering process. The opposite is then applied during playback. This has the effect of reducing background during produced during the recording and Mastering process..
For Vinyl; RIAA curve/equalisation. For CD Audio; Pre-Emphasis.
A CD Audio player will detect when "Pre-Emphasis" is utilised and apply the corrective process. PC optical drives cannot.

It might not be an issue with most of your CDs. But who knows? You might have a cornucopia of collectables.

The RIAA curve was used when cutting vinyl masters because of the mechanical limitations of the physical grooves.  Loud low frequencies would result in large modulations of the playback stylus causing distortion at best and jumping out of the groove at worst.  So the low frequencies were reduced during recording to avoid this.  During playback, the phono input channel of the audio amplifier would apply an equal and opposite effect to the sound, to remove the RIAA curve.  Similarly with the high frequencies (though for slightly different reasons).  When digitising a vinyl record, RIAA processing is not an issue if the audio signal into the PC is taken from the 'line out' of an audio amp (the output used to connect to a tape recorded for example) because the phono input of the amplifier will have already applied the RIAA correction.  If, per chance, the audio is digitised directly from the record deck then RIAA correction can be applied in software.  It really is not a big issue.

I've not heard about CD pre-emphasis and don't know why it would be necessary, certainly not for the mechanical reasons that occur with vinyl.  But if it is present on some old CDs then it would also be possible to remove it with software, so no doubt there will be something out there to do so.

But all this focus on precise frequency curve correction becomes a bit moot when most people just use tone controls to adjust the sound to their own preference anyway, rather than accept how it was originally mixed.  That's why almost all audio amplifiers include tone controls!

Terrysdelight

TheRightOne said:

avoidtheupsidedownbottles said:

OP stated they just wanted to listen to a few CDs, already has voice command track access via Alexa but doesn't want to have to look up track names each time.  
CDs could already play through DVD and soundbar which OP was apparently happy with in the past.  Or a single further Sonos purchase would allow the DVD to play through the Sonos network.
Spending hours and hours ripping everything (how many CDs exactly?) and moving files around from pillar to post for this apparently limited requirement sounds nutty to me.  

Sounds nutty to spend £400 on a SONOS Connect so that you can listen to a few CDs via the SONOS network. 

So advice was given on how to move forward in the 21st century. That is to digitize one's collection of music and video. This is for good reason. CD don't last forever.

According to the US National Archives, CDs and DVDs have very similar lifespans. Generally, unrecorded (blank) CDs and DVDs have a shelf-life of five to ten years. The experiential life expectancy of recorded CDs and DVDs is between two and five years, though based on manufacturer claims, ten to twenty five years, or even longer, isn’t unprecedented. In any case, using very conservative numbers will reduce the risk of losing data.

I do have to move forward with Technology.  Just loads happened in the last few years and I haven't had the time to think about anything.   To be honest, I am probably fine to play the odd CD through a DVD player on the sound bar etc.  I am one of those people who likes to 'see' my collection of music, rather than search for what I might want to listen too.  A pleasurable memory could be triggered, and straight away, I know exactly where to look for that special album/CD.  Again, a quick sideways glance at a collection of CD's, can give me that buzz of 'aw, I haven't listened to that music for ages' - I can then at least pick it up and bang it on.  Alternatively, I have the exact Artist Info/Album name to hand and I can ask Alexa to play it assuming our internet hasn't gone down again.  Villages in the middle of nowhere aren't always the best for internet.  

Thank you for all your help, it's appreciated.

Mickey666

Terrysdelight said:

Mickey666 said:

Storage is so cheap these days that it's simpler to just buy a larger hard drive for your PC.  I chose a NAS drive for flexibility but I have network wiring thoughout the house and some other special requirements, but the principle is the same.   Cloud storage simply cannot be relied upon to be available 100% of the time.   Actually, USB memory sticks are pretty cheap these days.  My music collection is around 15,000 songs and around 80GB whereas a 128GB memory stick is less than £20 so I could carry it around on my keyring with plenty of room to expand if I wanted to!

Thank you.  That sounds an excellent idea.  I have cat 6 cables everywhere - all waiting to be connected up - three years later the cables are still just hanging out of the ceiling.  If I remember rightly, the cables are to connect into a patch or a switch thing, then that connects to the router and basically makes the Sonos hardwired because it is more reliable.

Hardwiring is definitely more reliable for home networking and Cat6 cabling will easily support gigabit speeds and more.  That's not to say that wifi isn't convenient (who wants to sit on their sofa with an ipad trailing a network cable?!) but most people have wifi signal problems throughout their home, whcih is why there's a ready market for wifi extenders and the like.

With a wired infrastructure it become trivially easy to add wifi access points in any room with a LAN outlet.  My current favourite is this TP-Link access point: https://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-EAP115-WALL-WLAN-Access-Point/dp/B01MY3YI6Y

It's no more visible than a standard plug outlet and requres no separate power supply because it gets power over the ethernet wiring as long as your network switch has 'PoE' capability (Power over Ethernet), which most do these days.  The Ethernet cabling ensures there is no loss of speed due to interference as there can be with 'mesh' wifi systems or Powerline extenders, and you get perfect wifi reception within the room.  And all for around £30. 

A wired Ethernet infrastructure also makes it trivially easy to add things like IP CCTV cameras and smart TVs to your home, plus many other things, without the compromises and frustrations of wifi connections.