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admin_exported

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Hi all, I may not be the biggest audiophile in the world, and certainly do not have a McIntosh amp etc to prove my hi-fi credentials but I still regard myself as someone who values good quality audio, and more to the point, I enjoy sitting down and listening to music.

People's music listening habits have clearly transformed in the past 5-10 years. Whereas in the 60s/70s/80s and 90s people would listen to a vinyl/tape/CD in a relatively simple way, from start to finish (sweeping generalization, and maybe only partially true, but bear with me) today, in the 21st century, a great deal of music listening seems to happen around a computer or on the move with a MP3 player.

Music is still as popular as ever but it is quite clear that the form in which it exists is changing. From a physical matter it is now becoming digital. As a result the art of listening to an album seems to be on the decline. This is quite sad to me! I am one of those people who has digitized their entire CD collection (in lossless AAC format!) using iTunes. I also have a plethora of MP3 tracks where my current song total stands at a whopping 24,205 songs, which equates to about 1850 albums! This will continue to rise through the years.

I am very happy with the reduced clutter and the fact that all my music is at my fingertips. It is wonderful being able to flick through the covers of my music in iTunes and picking out what I want to listen to. The only problem is the quality of my listening experience has somewhat deteriorated. Ever since migrating my music over to my Mac I have slowly changed my listening habits, and in my opinion, for the worse. Instead of popping a CD into my hifi and pressing play I am now turning on my Mac, then launching iTunes, no doubt opening up Safari to browse the web and before you know it I have two or three things going on simultaneously. With the computer present it is difficult to distance myself away from it, and even if I do I still need to operate it to change a song or album!!!

Once upon a time my focus on the listening of the music was immense but now I seem to listen more closely to my music whilst commuting rather than at home, where the audio is at its optimum. My solution was to buy one of those Roku Soundbridge WIFI MP3 players which acted as a bridge between my Mac and my HIFI. With my Mac and itunes turned on the Soundbridge would detect the library and enable me to navigate and play whatever I wanted but through my hifi. It was about 75% what I wanted but the poor interface and sub-par sound quality meant it had to go.

The biggest issue for me however was the fact that my Mac still had to be on, as that is where my music is stored. The concept of having a computer whirring in the background just so I can listen to music sounded very inefficient and barely environmentally friendly. Surely there is a better solution? But there doesn't seem to be one on the market, so I thought one up in my head, and would like to present it to everyone here to gauge feedback and suggestions etc.

Imagine Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, unveiling to the hi-fi world a new Apple product that would revolutionize hi-fi as we know it. For the sake of understanding, it will be referred to as Apple HIFI. Here we go. A hi-fi separate. with a 500gb terabyte removable hard drive (a caddy slot, much like what the Mac Pros utilise) capable in storing 1100 hours worth of lossless audio (44.1khz 16bit). It has a 802.11n wireless card that seeks out your iTunes collection, whether it is on a Mac or PC.

After pairing your Apple HIFI to your iTunes library it will proceed to copy every single music/audio podcast file you have onto its internal hard drive. If you have a number of gigabytes worth of music already in your library you can physically connect the Apple HIFI to your computer using a USB cable, connecting to the USB 2.0 port on the rear, making the sync process quicker. Once fully synced you now effectively have two copies of your iTunes library; one on your computer and one on the hi-fi.

From now on, whatever you download or rip into your itunes library is wirelessly synced into your Apple HIFI, keeping both versions identical. Whenever iTunes adds new music to its library it alerts the paired Apple HIFI, which proceeds to copy the data to its own library. Once music is transferred you can turn off your computer as it is not needed for listening to music.

The Apple HIFI boasts high quality analog and digital output connections that yield the best sound performance. Phono and SPDIF are provided. Implementing Apple's world renowned iPod interface you can now search through your entire collection via the large round dial and using the widescreen LCD display. Search through music by album, artist, genre, year, even date added. Whatever playlists you have in your itunes are available on the Apple HIFI and everything is instantaneous due to the lightning quick SATA hard drive.

The Apple HIFI is also future proof by enabling you to remove the existing hard drive if you ever get to the stage of filling it up (it will take a long time with a 500GB HD), and therefore replacing it with a no doubt faster, larger and cheaper drive. It can play all the formats currently supported by iTunes, which includes WAV, AAC (including Lossless), MP3 etc. Provided is a remote that enables the powering on and off of the system, searching and selecting of music as well as the standard play/pause/forward/rewind and stop actions.

The Apple HIFI is nearly silent with a noise insulated casing that contains the hard drive's sound, whilst also conforming to the standard widths of most hifi separates. Available in black the Apple HIFI sits naturally within your existing hifi setup, expanding upon the music available. ___

Right, now I know this is all fiction at the moment. Still, I don't know about you, I think this has real potential and if Apple announced something like this tomorrow I would be the first to buy it. So all I would like to know now guys is what do you think? Does this have scope and would it actually be popular?

Thanks Chris
 

gregory

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if i were you i would patent this idea pronto,i myself prefer 2 channel stereo in the comfort of an armchair and a glass of wine by my side and am quite happy to get out of my chair and change to side 2 of a record,but i can see the use of computer music for convenience sake as time is precious to us all,although i cant help feeling that something like this already exists but if not someone reading this may well think good idea i'll do that,but i'm no computer expert so maybe some of the members can enlighten us on this idea.
 
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Anonymous

Guest
Why don't you use an iPod with a dock to a decent two channel amp and speakers? What you have described is pretty much there.
 
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Anonymous

Guest
while there is certainly some merit in your suggestion, i believe the simple truth is that there would not be enough demand for such a product to warrant apples interest. only huge demand for such a product could create a scenario whereby production costs (and therefore retail price) would be low enough for everybody concerned.
 

John Duncan

Well-known member
Doesn't the Sonos require your PC to be on? I haven't paid that much attention to it tbh, whereas Apple TV definitely synchs with your PC in the same way as an iPod, and doesn't require your PC/Mac to be running.

Happy to be corrected, but can't immediately find on the Sonos website where it stores music?
 

matthewpiano

Well-known member
[quote user="gregory"]... i myself prefer 2 channel stereo in the comfort of an armchair and a glass of wine by my side and am quite happy to get out of my chair and change to side 2 of a record...[/quote]

Me too Gregory. Somehow there is a certain magic about doing things the 'old fashioned' way!!! As a fairly young man (29) I think I should be embracing downloads and computer servers more but I just can't get interested in them.
 
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Anonymous

Guest
Hi John,

No you don't need to have your PC on for the SONOS to work. However you do need to have it connected to a strorage device, I currently use a MAXTOR 300Gb NAS to liten to FLAC files. Or alternativley you can use Napster, I haven't used the drive since I signed up to have access to some 5 million + tracks directly from Napster via an internet connection.
 
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Anonymous

Guest
The problem here is I cannot fit 350GB worth of music onto any iPod.

No doubt this will be a reality in a short space of time but not yet. And I now you could argue that all I need to do is choose what I want to listen to that day and sync up my ipod but then this starts to detract from the spontaneity that a digital music library affords.
 
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Anonymous

Guest
The problem with the Apple TV is you need your TV on to navigate through your collection and the internal hard drive is a maximum of 160GB, which is half of my music collection. It does not allow official storage expansion and once again, it can play music from your computer but this means your computer must be on.
 
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Anonymous

Guest
[quote user="chrisjothi"]The problem here is I cannot fit 350GB worth of music onto any iPod.

No doubt this will be a reality in a short space of time but not yet. And I now you could argue that all I need to do is choose what I want to listen to that day and sync up my ipod but then this starts to detract from the spontaneity that a digital music library affords.[/quote]

Yeah, I agree. For me it would be a cost-benefit decision. I'm used to changing CDs so iPod convenience is a clear benefit. I'm digging deep into my memory here, but is it Windows Vista and a few laptops with mini-lid displays that let you use the computer as a music player whilst closed down? Now I'm not sure how it would achieve this but I'm sure I remember something.
 

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