Someone please 'splain me

Fantastic response, Ckorody. One of the best thought out and written explainations I have seen on Audiogon.

Considering SB myself, and have been hung on the installation and coordination of devices, etc. Your timely post helps me make some decisions.

Howard, if you get SB or another route, please share your findings.

Thanks again,
Doug

Ckorody,
Thank you so much for taking the time to explain all of this. That was very thoughtful of you.

First, it would seem that the easiest way to do this might be to connect the external hard drive to an old laptop that we don't use much now, and then we wouldn't need to buy the SB or Airport Express, correct? If she's downstairs, we won't be able to connect a cable from her to the preamp upstairs. Listening between floors generally doesn't present a need to control volume, so maybe she could simply turn on the music in the morning and let it play all day.

We're in the process of starting a new business, so I don't have much time (or desire) to play around with this. I'm hoping for a quick and easy setup. I'll be ripping much of the tunes from a friend's CD, as he, my wife, and I share musical tastes, and that way we both have a backup drive in case of a meltdown.

I will look into some of the suggestions you mentioned regarding file management. We don't have iPod's (imagine that), and won't have a use for them anytime soon. Other than the older laptop, all of the other computers in the house are brand new, and our business is web-based, so we should have sufficient RAM, I would hope.

I'll read through your post again and see what else I might absorb. Thank you again for taking so much time to respond.

Regards,
Howard

Ckorody,

Excellent post.

I just wanted to stress that you should backup your music library regularly. I had almost 1300 CD's ripped in lossless go up in smoke last month when my music HD turned into a flaming ball of crap. I had a backup drive, but I had just loaned it to a friend to backup his data while doing a clean install. If you have a large collection of music, I suggest you go with either a Firewire800 or E-SATA drive for backup. USB2.0 drives are painfully slow so figure about 60-90 minutes for every 100GB of data.

On a side note, I have the Bolder modded SB2 with the deluxe power supply. It is so good that I sold my reference tube SACD/CD player here on Agon. I'll never go back to listening to the physical CD's again. I use a wince PDA to control the SB via wifi. I can browse through my entire collection with ease.

Hi Howard -

An old laptop should have the poop to do it assuming that's all its doing.Certainly won't take much to figure that part out. If that is the case, hooking the external HD to it makes fine sense, and will also make a good place to rip. (BTW I agree with my friend Prpixel but did not mention SATA because I don't know if/how it works with a laptop... )

That said, sooner or later somehow the data needs to get from the laptop to the preamp. If you don't have Airport or an SB that means that you have to use USB. It also means you will need a DAC. If you have a DAC you can also use a sound card - not recommended - to provide SPDIF or Toslink to the DAC. But somehow the data needs to become audio input again. So pick your poison.

Seems like it would make things nicer for your wife to get a small self powered pair of speakers (Klipsch sells refurbed ones very inexpensively) and let her have all the interface and control where she is working. Nothing worse IMHO then having to run upstairs to turn down the volume because an important call came in...

I will monitor this for a few days in case you have any other questions.

Sorry, Ckorody, I should have explained further:
We have a CD player, and I'm having a digital input installed into it in a couple of weeks. We will also have the modder (APL) make us a USB-SPDIF converter. So...the DAC will be/already is connected to the preamp.

If she has iTunes at her computer downstairs, will she be able to turn down the volume from there? I guess that's what the SB or Airport Express would be for, yes? And finally, we would only be using the laptop for running iTunes upstairs, yes. I can put a wireless adaptor on it and connect it to our network. She'd be sitting pretty if she had a Palm to control everything from downstairs, but alas, I'll have it with me as I'm out visiting customers.

Thank you again for the input. This is so helpful.

Regards,
Howard