Networked Receiver or Music Server - thoughts please

[superstar]

I thought I read you can play FLAC?

The local Tweeter has a bunch of these on clearance as the store is closing. If it could play a lossless format I would be tempted.

Just curious if anyone has cracked one of these open to see what type of drive it has and if it can be upgraded?

If you are willing to to open up the box to upgrade it, then you are better off streaming music from a pc, otherwise you will need the disc to rebuild the OS, and that's if it comes with it, just a guess it's probably linux based. Chances are if they offer something similar with higher disk space, then you can swap it with a bigger drive.

 

[trailertrash]

If you are willing to to open up the box to upgrade it, then you are better off streaming music from a pc, otherwise you will need the disc to rebuild the OS, and that's if it comes with it, just a guess it's probably linux based. Chances are if they offer something similar with higher disk space, then you can swap it with a bigger drive.

I agree about the streaming. I was just curious if anyone was upgrading these. They are way overpriced as it is so I doubt people are hacking them. I would ghost the drives if I were to upgrade the drive.

 

[superstar]

I agree about the streaming. I was just curious if anyone was upgrading these. They are way overpriced as it is so I doubt people are hacking them. I would ghost the drives if I were to upgrade the drive.

That's good thinking, ghosting then resize it with Partition Magic? How cheap are they selling it? do you have a link?

 

[trailertrash]

That's good thinking, ghosting then resize it with Partition Magic? How cheap are they selling it? do you have a link?

They are selling at the Saugus Tweeter location (it is closing), I think for arround $600. They had a stack of them in there. They may be worth $200, if that, to me. If they played FLAC (and I was pretty confident I could drop a 500 gb SATA drive in it) I would be tempted to go in and haggle with them for a more reasonable price.

 

[fmw]

I already had a spare computer I didn't need on my network. I spent $150 for a wireless router and transceiver and $75 for a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I can access the internet for internet radio, movies or downloads, I have my 200GB hard drive filled with ripped CD's. I can play PC games on it on a 42" monitor. Definitely the way to go if you have a spare PC or want to buy one.

 

[midna]

I don't know if you have already decided against the sonos system or not but my parents recently purchased it and a NAS (networked attached storage) to store the music on and LOVE it. The setup was a piece of cake (connect devices, put the included cd into a computer and follow the very simple directions). The system connects to streaming radio stations without any problems and plays all the music back from the NAS again without any problems. They have one of the "players" wired into the network and it had a very handy 2 port ethernet switch so they used it to connect the NAS. The other player is powering speakers in my dad's office and is controlled wirelessly.

It sounds good to me, but take that with a grain of salt since I really have no audio experience.

The UI on the controller could be a bit more responsive but its not enough to annoy them (or me), just enough that you still realize it. Also, the Sonos system is expensive (1G for 1 "controller" and 2 "players"). You could save money by not buying the controller and only getting one player as the software to control the system seems polished and easy to use (I actually prefer it to the controller). Another annoyance is that every once and a while something happens to the permissions of the music files (could be any number of things mucking it up including me ) and the Sonos "controller" complains it can't read a music file. A quick music update solves the problem but it's annoying to have to rescan the music library and the rescan may become an issue as they rip more and more cd's to the NAS.

One thing of note: the NAS didn't come with the Sonos system and was purchased separately. If you do buy a NAS consider buying one that has two drives instead of one so that you can use RAID in mirroring mode. That way if one drive fails (which seems to be happening more and more as drive capacities go up and tolerances go down) you don't lose all your data.

Sorry if this sounds like an ad, for a while we had a computer that controlled the in home stereo; it was nice and did what we wanted, but it wasn't near as easy to use and was constantly having issues (I hate updates now). Plus, the Sonos system is a new toy so I'm sure we'll find more things we don't like about it as time passes.