CarlDW said:
davedotco said:
CarlDW said:
Thanks for the input so far.
DDC, I still enjoy CD's, so would prefer some sort of CD player/transport. I am not adverse to ripping my entire music collection onto a hard drive or whatever, but bearing in mind the age of my laptop it may take quite some time...
The convenience of Bluetooth would be a bonus.
I really find duplicating sources to be a bit of a pain, maybe that is just me.
You can make this as simple or as complex as you like, a pair of powered speakers such as the Q Acoustics BT3 or Roth OLI 5 and a CD/DVD/Blueray player will give you what you want.
On the other hand you can build a a separates networked system to whatever standard you like, you really need to make some decisions as to which way you want to go, there are simply too many options open to you.
I would be interested to know what you would do, in my position, and what you would purchase.
To be honest, I would not be in your position.
I don't like or want any kind of optical player, nor would I use Bluetooth. I am all Apple and prefer Airplay, probably not helpful.
To paraphrase an old joke, "I wouldn't start from there".
If you simply want to make the best of what you have, than the powered speaker options I suggested above would be my choice. The Roth can be bought for around £225, the Q Acoustics is £300+. Universal optical players are cheap and both the speakers mentioned have Toslink inputs.
If I wanted better than that then I would reconsider everything from scratch. Work out exactly what you want to achieve and go for it, piece by piece if necessary. For example, if I was happy to run everything on a computer I would buy an inexpensive laptop, rip my CDs to its hard drive, then play them with decent media player software into a good cheap USB dac driving a pair of active monitors.
The Dac and active speakers can cost as little as £150, or more, much more if you wish. If you rip your discs in a lossless format the Dac should recieve a bit perfect copy of the CD, this is as good as it gets, the playback quality will then be determined by the quality of the Dac and speakers only, mainly the speakers of course.