Advice Wanted - combined MP3 (maybe) and TV Sound System

[admin_exported]

I guess that I am an old fogey now, and my Panasonic Hi-Fi(!) is 20 year old, though I did add mini-discs at some time. Most of my music is on CD, which I have ripped to my PC.

I am not looking for the ultimate Hi-Fi, I don’t think that my ears are that good, but I don’t want any obvious flaws. My ripped (256) CDs sound good to me over my 5.1 PC sound system.

I also still have a CRT TV, but I do have cable, including HD and Radio.

So what I would like to do is get a flat screen TV, and a more up to date Hi-Fi, preferably with not too many separate boxes – So I would like to use the same sound system for the TV sound and Hi-Fi. I want it to be easy to select what I want to listen to, and I would like a random track selection facility. I don’t want to rely on wireless access, thought I guess this would be useful.

The problem is that the technology has moved on so far since I last looked at this I am having difficulty making sense of it. I like the look of the Brennan MP3 player, but that seems to be all that it does. Is there a home cinema system will a hard disc that will play MP3s and deal with the TV sound.

Or are there other better solutions to my needs?

Any ideas to direct my research (mainly via your magazine & web-site) will be appreciated.

PS: I still have a fair number of vinyl LPs, it is worth transferring these to MP3 via the decks that are widely advertised?

 

[Anonymous]

I had a similar issue with my aging hi-fi system. It was not remote control so I updated it so i could use if for tv sound and music.

There is all sorts of solutions available today to allow for high quality mp3 playback like logitech's squeezebox and airport express etc. They seem to be very complicated and scary to get your head round them at the start but actually they are pretty simple plug and play devices. They just allow you to access the mp3's on your pc and then wirelessly stream them to wherever your hifi is with a nice remote control to look after the selections. Some of them have very high quality digital to audio converters in them so they will definitely sound very good.

This link may be helpful to get the general gist of the technology and its limitations.

http://ask.metafilter.com/44068/AirTunes-vs-Squeezebox

I just use a Topfield 5800 PVR Freeview hard drive recorder and load it up with mp3's via usb and then software can be dowloaded for it from http://www.toppy.org.uk/ in the for of TAP's (media player, jukebox eg) to play the mp3's and have a nice tv interface. You do have to link the topfield up with the computer by usb to transfer any mp3's over first so it may not be convenient. I then use the optical audio out from the topfield and feed it to a separate DAC (Beresford 7520) first to give higher quality audio conversion but it is still decent coming out of the topfield audio out directly. Other solutions are more specialised and possibly more user friendly but it suits me ok.

There are also all in one hard drive box systems like naim's uniti but it is kind of expensive! There are others like sonos which may be cheaper.

I bought an arcam alpha 9 amp and some B&W 601s3's speakers (used) on our favourite online auction site, and then connected it all up with good cables and i would never use the tv only sound again!

I don't know if any of this is at all useful but i do remember when i was thinking about upgrading i found it very hard to work out what i needed. I can relate to the fact that the technology has moved on so much since i bought my first kit and so can be confusing to work out what exactly any of it does. But after some research i worked out that it is not nearly as involved and complicated as i had feared and once you get your head round it it actually makes a lot of sense. There really are some excellent music solutions out there.

Hope you find something that works for you.