[kitaoji]

Hi all,

First of all, I apologize in advance for my newbie-ness. Please correct me if I've gotten anything wrong.

I currently belong to lap-fi: my laptop and Echo Indigo IO soundcard and foobar do everything for me. However, because I don't really want to keep on turning on my laptop to listen to music, I'm interested in some other sources.

The catch? 99.9% of my music is in mp3/m4a/other digital format.

Having seen some car audio receivers, I'm looking for something similar - something that allows me to plug in my external hard drive through USB (or something else?) and then let me listen to the music through the audio out (or digital out, which then lets me hook it up to an amp).

To date, I've seen the TEAC CRH-255 that seems to do the trick, but for ~235 pounds, I'm interested if there's anything cheaper.

Does anybody have any suggestions, for a pretty good and more importantly, inexpensive and small (maybe a couple of external CD drives big) CD receiver? Or is this kind of approach somewhat silly and I shouldn't even try it? Any further suggestions on what I should look out for would be extremely helpful as well.

I've been worried because whenever I want to burn in a pair of headphones, or make any changes, the only thing I can use is my laptop, and I don't want it to take too much abuse.

I'm not looking for any particular music servers, since I'm a college student with limited amount of space - something like a bedside setup will do wonders. And then I can start hooking up some small speakers, and... ::wallet dies::

Thanks for all your help.

 

[granodemostasa]

squeeze box has a good music server that can take in digital/simply find a cheap CD player, plug it in, plug the squeezebox to your amp and your all set. it also connects directly to the internet so that you can listen to internet radio/burn in using internet radio without your computer on.
it cost 250 though, and there are a number of audiophile firms that do modds to it to make it even better. Boulder is one such company (there is a thread on this forum about it).
also: first burn the music collection on CDs if you plan on using hte CD service.
if one of your mp3 players has has a digital out/an analogue out and connect it directly to an amp/squeeze box and that could also work.
there are hard drive based music players, but their price seems a bit steep considering that a 30gig ipod could do the same thing if it is given a turbodock. Panisonic sells one such thing.
here is another:http://www.pcworld.com/resource/arti...RSS,RSS,00.asp
Personally: i'm still using my external hard drive-laptop-external sound card based system, but i could make a similar switch soon, if i find a perfect solution (my ipod only has 4gigs so it can't hold a decent percentage of my music collection).