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Originally Posted by wavoman
...Then buy the weakest HUSH (I gotta be 100% fanless and I can't build anything, all thumbs) I can with a solid state drive so nothing spins, I mean 0 db, and use USB or I2S for perfect sound, bit-for-bit as good as the most expensive CDP.
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You can probably find something cheaper than Hush but still 0dB if all you want to do is play media (depending on USB/I2S support) - but the Hush stuff is fairly sexy. You can also buy pre-built MythTV boxes, but MythTV itself has a fairly clunky audio player interface so you need to use something else for that. And you might want to think about whether you want to play music without the aid of a TV screen or not...
Quote:
Originally Posted by wavoman
Your MythTV system sounds great.
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Well, various bits crash every so often (typically the MythTV UI) and the box needs some Linux admin at other times - usually when I'm not home. I've created a couple of watchdogs and means to logoff/reboot in severe cases, but it's not entirely consumer grade usability or robustness yet.
I don't have it RAIDED either - makes it hard to fit everything in one case once you get 2TB+ storage and want to RAID it, and I don't have a good location for a split system. I back up all the non-TV data to external drives and let the TV fend for itself. Any TV I _really_ want to keep I can back up elsewhere too.
But all-in-all it's very enjoyable
And I have great freedom to upgrade it as I want, which most off-the-shelf products won't give you. I started out with 1TB and I'm likely to reach 3TB sometime this year...and I'll upgrade the GPU and/or CPU when I like the cost/benefit ratio...
I agree there's no need for an expensive CDP if I can get bit-perfect data off the hard disk and feed it into a decent DAC without inducing jitter. Tried to explain that concept to a traditional audiophile a couple of months ago ("CDs are just data" and "just think of the computer like a huge transport") but it's sometimes hard to get the concept across. In fact I prefer to grab the datastream off the hard drive (where I can back it up to a backup drive that I - should - keep offsite, and leave the CDs themselves in a bookshelf somewhere else). No shuffling CDs trying to find the one you want...and lots of ways to choose which tracks to play that can't really be done with CDs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wavoman
However it replaced a RAID-like array of 11 VCR's which my wife invented so we could pause and rewind live TV before DVR's were invented.
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Wow, impressive - how did that work?