[mediumwell]

Slowly, I have been turning my old CDs in FLAC files. Mostly I play these files on my laptop (Winamp) with headphones. However, I have a really nice old Fisher 300B tube amp with some pretty good speakers. I would like to play the files through this amp. The problem is, I'm guessing that I'm losing some sound quality by playing these files through my laptop because of a crap sound card. Is this a correct assumption?
 
If so, is there a good FLAC player (it doesn't have to portable) that can sit along site my amplifier and play these FLAC files? Something that has a good menu, sound card etc? Like a home stereo flac player?
 
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks.

 

[H20Fidelity]

Yes, the laptop soundcards are usually average.

You'd probably be better off looking at a DAC for your laptop. Doing so bypasses the internal soundcard. Depending how much you want to spend even something like FiiO E10 dac/amp provides a line out. Using that you'd be bypassing the internal soundcard feeding your Fisher 300B the signal. Even DAC Destroyer found on ebay will be good.

I'm not exactly sure on full size FLAC players. Someone else would need to help you there, I just don't hear about them only portable MP3 players supporting the FLAC Codec.

I would also ask your question in our computer audio section.

http://www.head-fi.org/f/46/computer-audio

 

[mediumwell]

Thanks for that. I was imagining a cool touchscreen device that would play the FLAC files and maybe even, via wifi, have access to the album covers. How cool would that be. I'm surprised that someone hasn't made something like this. Maybe we FLAC nuts are just too fringe to make it work.
 
How about this:
 
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/833986-REG/Audioengine_D1_PREMIUM_24_BIT_DIGI_to_ANALOG.html
 
This would work I assume?

 

[skamp]

I was imagining a cool touchscreen device that would play the FLAC files and maybe even, via wifi, have access to the album covers.

Sounds exactly like the Squeezebox Touch.

 

[mediumwell]

Quote:

Sounds exactly like the Squeezebox Touch.

Hmmm.... so it looks like I could put my music files on USB hard drive and then play them through this into my Amp. Very cool. I'm assuming that the sound card is high quality?
 
Thanks for this skamp! This might be the solution.

 

[skamp]

You can either plug a USB flash drive or a USB HDD, or you can stream your FLACs from your computer (it's a networked player to begin with). And yeah, Squeezebox products are generally well regarded, sound quality wise.

 

[mediumwell]

I just found this: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33199_7-57519226-221/logitech-leaves-squeezebox-fans-wondering-whats-next/
 
It looks like Squeeze Box is being discontinued. Sounds like the website and service that provides streaming and music data might get shut down. It will still work to stream FLAC from a hard drive, but the cool album artwork and radio function could die off....

 

[fzman]

if you are on a pc, you could use the Marantz NA7004, and run jriver on your  pc.  Music would be controlled either by the computer or you could use the Android app Gizmo. This is a well designed, well-executed playback system and will sound quite good.  

 

[skamp]

It will still work to stream FLAC from a hard drive, but the cool album artwork and radio function could die off....

Streaming is done from your own PC, that will still work. It's not an online service.