Advice on streaming needed

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shane
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#1 Advice on streaming needed

Post by shane »

Funny how you don't realise how little you know about something until you try to explain it to someone else.

After a long time when for various reasons he wasn't that bothered, my brother has recently revived his interest in hifi, and has discovered computer audio. He's had his old Quad 57s and 44/405 rebuilt, and has been using them in his study fed from the USB output of his Vista desktop PC via one of those Chinese 4396 Ebay DACs. Music is all stored on the PC's internal hard drive although he also has a USB hard drive available.

He's quite happy with all of that, but has now decided he wants to move the Quad amp and speakers into his sitting room whilst retaining the ability to feed the DAC into an ancient Armstrong 621 and a pair of surprisingly good Quad 11L2 speakers he's got knocking around for when he's listening in the study. This means that we need to find a way to feed the system in the sitting room from the PC in the study.

The obvious choice would be a Squeezebox, but I'm reluctant to send him off to look for second-hand gear of unknown provenance, 'cos I know what'll happen.

What's the simplest (and cheapest) alternative?

Oh yes, there is a pair of ancient and horrible phono-phono leads about 20' long buried under the floor from one room to the other, but it's not possible to put in any other cabling without ripping up the recently laid flooring and carpet, which isn't going to happen!
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Neal
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#2

Post by Neal »

Squeezebox is probably the cheapest alternative, well maybe the easiest! Get a Classic s/h off ebay...or there's Sonos (expensive but good if a bit limited) or something like the Pioneer N50. Failing that go DIY with the Raspberry PI or similar platform, many are emerging...or cheap laptop/netbook & USB DAC and use the PC upstairs as a Windows Share....or add a local USB drive and move your music files to it...
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Mike H
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#3

Post by Mike H »

I would have thought a line buffer / driver capable of feeding those leads. I'm assuming the same audio source (PC) is used for both rooms. Pity leads can't be replaced though, sounds like just the job for Rapid's instrument cable (wot I use everywhere now).
 
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shane
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#4

Post by shane »

Ebay it is! I'm really surprised that no-one's come up with a suitable replacement yet. Come to that, why on earth did Logitech abandon it in the first place?

How about Longdog Audio Streaming Server Internet Equipment? Bound to give faithful reproduction....
Last edited by shane on Sat Oct 05, 2013 11:00 am, edited 2 times in total.
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izzy wizzy
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#5

Post by izzy wizzy »

It would seem from what I read that internal politics and poor decision making combined to kill the Squeeze project off within Logitech.

The future for Squeeze is with the open source community be it small Raspberry Pi or other small computers like it, then there's the wandboard application team's effort and then there's the ickStream project of which little is known apart from it will be Squeeze with knobs on.

piCorePlayer with ext DAC works best for what I want.

cheers,

Stephen
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