Dummy Guide on What's Needed to hook up Mini Mac

Gonzo1,

You have a nice simple system that is the direction I would like to go except for the YBA amplification that I like very much - very musical.

Now a few questions for anyone:

1.) How convientient is the Mac Book for playing cds?

2.) Can you play DCDs as well with another USB cable for the picture to the HDTV?

3.) How many cds can be saved on an 80 gig internal drive in lossless?

"Now a few questions for anyone:

1.) How convientient is the Mac Book for playing cds?

2.) Can you play DCDs as well with another USB cable for the picture to the HDTV?

3.) How many cds can be saved on an 80 gig internal drive in lossless?"

1. It's not. The only way I will be using the Macbook is with the music ripped in Itunes, stored on my hard drive, and replayed from the hard drive. If I need to play a disc without ripping it, I will play it on my Oppo.

2. While It will output video to a TV through the mini-dvi port, I probably will not use it for that, again, that is what the Oppo is for. I will have it hooked up though to watch tv shows downloaded from Itunes.

3. 80 G? maybe 150 to 175 albums. I'd still use an external HD though.

I really like it so far. I ripped all the new Donald Fagen discs from his new box set "The Nightfly Trilogy", created a "smart playlist" with only those songs and hit play. The monitor went to "sleep," the music kept playing through all three albums.

I haven't yet sold my Primare CD player. The sound is more full and the bass is deeper with the spinner, but there is more detail with the Macbook/PSaudio. And of course the Macbook is so much easier to use and its nice not having discs laying around.

1. The MacBook will play CD's through its slot drive (also how you would rip them). I would say you'll have to put up with a bit of whirring noise in that case (not as quiet as your average CD player but I'd venture to guess not that annoying to most unless you listen to a lot of quiet music). Not sure why you'd choose playing the CD over ripping it and playing the content off of iTunes in that case.

2.Can't answer the question about DCD's, but the digital input on a DAC definitely does not decode a digital video signal. There is a device called MacTV that you should look into for those kinds of purposes, though I don't know specifically if it will do what you're asking. Video content takes up a huge amount of space on a hard drive.

3. It depends on the compression scheme you use. Generally, as a WAV file the average audio CD takes up around 600mb of space (110 cd's on your 80gig drive). In apple lossless a CD will take up about half that amount of space so you can practically double the number of CD's the drive would hold. I would definitely buy a drive that you can expand on if you get new CD's.

Thanx Jax2,

I'm not familiar with the terminology. I ment ripping my cd collection to the computer with apple lossless and then playing them from the computer.

I had a typo also. I ment playing DVDs not DCDs from the computer.

So I probably can get 220 lossless cds on a 80 gig hard drive. Correct?

No whirring noise if playing from iTunes. Yes, you'd rip them via the CD drive on the computer. Yes, you could play DVD's on the MacBook - the software comes with the operating system. Yep around 220+ lossless CD's on your 80gb drive....correct.

Marco