Greetings to all and Happy Thanksgiving, etc.... This is my first post in 3 years the last time people were GREAT with sage advice that saved me hundreds...Thanks in advance to all!!!
First my system. For Audio I have an antique Marantz 4070 quad amp from 1974. Has run great all these years, and is now beginning to fail. Connected are a sony CD changer, older pioneer digital am/fm tuner. It drives a pair of bose 901's in another room through the bose equalizer and 2 ceiling mounted speakers in the kitchen. The sony cd changer provides the ability to load up with lots of music, put it on random and walk away for a couple hours. I realized in this "digital" age, I probably have options. But I'm not sure I know what they are. Is this an issue I should be thinking about at this point, (i.e. finding a way to archive music in non-cd form at which point I can scrap my cd changer and use my dvd player to archive any new cd's to whatever storage I'm using), or is that just another black hole for $$. I'm assuming it means hooking up a PC with my music library to the AV receiver, or is there something else available? It is possible to rip my cd's to a high capacity external HD drive that is connected to the AV receiver as a music library? As the Marantz is "quad", it has beaucoup speaker connections. At the current time it is not connected to the 5.1, although it was in the past through a simple RCA cable into the yamaha's RCA stereo inputs, and viola, the music in 3 rooms.
In the same cabinet is my video system, a yamaha 5.1. "boxed" system which I got 3-4 years ago and runs well, driving a Toshiba plasma, signal comes from a comcast HD box and for DVD have a DMREH75V which is a 1080i VCR/DVD burner with 80 gig hard drive that seems like a hell of a unit that I sense I am not really even scratching the surface with. It seems complex as hell with horrible documentation, but I bought it because I needed a DVD player, it was 60% off as a floor sample and wanted to convert over 100 8mm and VHS home video cassettes to DVD, which it does well. I never have been able to hook it up to tape from TV, I know that sounds crazy with a 80gig HD because I should be able to do all types of cool time shifting, but I have spent hours with no success. I've never called panasonic though. Anyway, that is another post for another time.
video only plays in 1 room through the aforementioned yamaha 5.1.
So my usage is pretty simple. Either music in up to all three rooms, or TV in one room and music in one or both of the two other rooms. Probably would never use three input sources simultaneously.
So the driving force at the moment is the need to do something about the marantz amp. Here are the options that seem obvious to me, of course I am open to ALL comments...
1. get the amp fixed and leave everything else alone.
2. replace the amp with another inexpensive stereo amp and continue to have separate systems, continuing to use the old pioneer tuner with the amp.
3. replace my yamaha AV receiver with an AV receiver that will allow me to use the TV/audio as I mentioned above. In this option, I'm guessing the existing amp and tuner would go "bye, bye" and the AV receiver would handle it all, meaning it could drive the 5.1 plus two other pairs of speakers, one set through the bose equalizer for the 901s? Thanks for all the advice. tmy23
