Adding MP3 capability to the home stereo system

You have my interest peeked
I had dvd players that play MP3, VCD, CDRW & CDR, I just bought a little cable splitter (for the soundcard out on my computer, the other part of the Y is to my head phones (on all the time) and ran L/R audio to one of the inputs on my receiver, just hit the receiver input and bingo - what ever can play on the puter can play on the receiver - also not I have a video output so I plug the composite plug into the VCR and when I want to see the computer on the TV - it's very simple.

I also have an audio\video matrix switch with 8 inputs and 4 outputs, a cat5 transmitter & receiver. I ship the signal from the home entertainment center to anyone of the tv's where I run the cat5 and receiver.

Do you have a make/model no. on this switch. That sounds like it could be pretty interesting!

Distribution Matrix

mine has all the RCA plugs like the middle picture.Watch ebay sometime you can find one cheaper - this is over kill for the home

Try here

Hmmm.. I just found another toy that adds even more features.

PrisimIQ
http://www.prismiq.com/

not sure - looking at it.

It has all the features of the other (except the Motorola Wireless function) and it can also stream video including remoting your PC over to your TV set with it.

It does have a Cardbus slot so I could buy an 802.11g card and trun it into a wireless network setup.

I saw all that, I'm just wonder about video quality to TV, remember I already have the computer fully integrated to the TV via the VCR to the Switch to other TV's. I think for many of other folks it could very well be a great deal!!! - A little on the spendy side I think - really need video qualiity. I'm thinking about asking for a demo as an integrator. I bet I could sell a bunch.

Fishn
don't buy yet - I sent this jewell out to a couple AV buddies and one is getting back soon on something better I'm told - just waiting......

Kewl!

aren't those devices expensive? you can put together a computer to hook up to a tv, for fairly cheap plus it would be able to do much more.

i have a dvd player that plays mp3's off cd that i bought for $40 at circuit city. i don't know if it'll play mp3's off dvd's. i haven't tried it. it just so happens that the mp3s i regularly listen to fit absolutely perfectly onto a 700mb cd.

many video cards, and even motherboards, these days come with s-video or rca video-out. s-video will give you better quality. of course the best quality would be a dvi connection if you have an hdtv equiped with one. there are also dvi-to-component transcoders which are very good though it may cost you.

as for audio, many motherboards now have spdif-out which you can hook up to your receiver. or you can get a quality soundcard like the m-audio revolution 7.1 and dump the receiver all together.

if you go the computer route and you're ripping cd's, i would suggest a lossless format instead of mp3. there's wma9 lossless, flac, ape... i use ape myself, because it offers the best compression.

another major advantage of using a computer is that you can use it as a dvd player and the quality will be far beyond anything you can find in a standalone player. you can eve rip your dvd's to the hard drive and share them over the network.

putting it all together may be a pain but i think it would be well worth it.

I could buy one of these units for under $300 or I could by a $2000 PC to accomplish what you suggest.. Which turns out cheaper?



This is what I have been doing to this point only I've been burning them to DVD. I have a collection of about 60 DVDs filled with MP3s. It gets a bit tedious weeding through the 400+ songs on each to find what I want to listen to.

[/quote]as for audio, many motherboards now have spdif-out which you can hook up to your receiver. or you can get a quality soundcard like the m-audio revolution 7.1 and dump the receiver all together.[/quote]

What would I hook the other 15 components in my system to? I have 2 cassette decks, a reel-to-reel, a CD deck, 2 turntables, several sound processors, etc.. as well as 2 VCRs and 2 DVD players. If you can find me a PC with enough I/O ports to handle all of those and provide the audio quality that a high end receiver provides I'll reconsider. lol

$2000? i was talking about a PC not a mainframe. you can put one together for under $700.


like i said you can keep the receiver and use the spdif-out and save yourself some money. you would be able to get rid of some of your components (cd deck, dvd players). you have a receiver with 15 components hooked up to it? what receiver is this?
you can get a switch to hook up to the computer and yes it will give you the audio quality of a high end receiver.

Kind of close to what I have

Or I can buy a box for under $300.



It is a high end Dennon receiver I bought about 10 years ago. It has some quirks - DVDs didn't exist at the time but it has inputs for 2 Laser Disc players so I use those.. but it has 2 VCR inputs, 3 tape deck inputs, CD and Phono inputs as well as an AUX input. but I have enough audio equipment to fill 2 6 ft. tall 19" equipment racks easily. I actually have 2 additional receivers that I could use as well. I have a 2 cassette decks and an old 8 track tape unit (for fun!) connected into a DBX audio switch which all feeds into one of the tape inputs on the reciever and a phono switch so I can chenge between the 2 turntables. Most of these also have DBX sound compression matrixed in line with them and all of them can be routed through a reverb or bass enhancer if the mood strikes. If I really got a wild hair I even have a jack to plug in an electric guitar.

WOW - yer sounding a little like me LOL

of course if all you want is mp3 playback, those boxes will do just fine.
but a computer would be a high end cd/dvd player and the cd and dvd's can be ripped to the hard drive.
i'm assuming that your receiver doesn't have dts decoding if its that old. so a computer could serve that function as well. even hdtv if you'd like.

An update - I bought one of the PrismIQ boxes and it arrived Friday. I installed the software on my PC but it couldn't find any of my MP3 files and was behaving oddly (dialog boxes weren't appearing when they were supposed to, I couldn't get into the app settings screen, etc..)

I setup the box and connected it to the receiver but it couldn't find the computer on the network (although I could cruise the WWW with it). It also wouldn't recognize my wireless cardbus adapter so I had to use a Cat 5 cable for now.

I had been having some other problems with my system as well (i.e. couldn't run any of the MS Updates, uninstall apps, etc..) and it had been a year since I last started with a fresh OS install so I broke down and picked up a copy of WinXP Pro and installed that.

After installing the OS I ran the MS Updates and installed everything MS had to offer as well as a video driver update.

I downloaded the latest/greatest version of the PrismIQ software and installed that and it found everything just like it's supposed to do. Then I shut down the box, installed the wireless cardbus adapter, rebooted the set-top box and it self- configured the wireless setup and found the PC just fine.

At that point it does everything as advertised. I pulled Internet radio and played MP3s on it all evening while doing other work to get my system back in order. This thing has a full WWW browser built in so you can cruise anywhere in the web. (I'm going to try and play on A2K through it tonight just for grins.) But basically, anything you can see with a WWW browser on your PC you can do with this box on your TV.

Video on the TV isn't great but it is acceptable. It's about the equeal of VGA 640x480 on a PC but then with only 480 lines of resolution of a standard TV you can't expect to much.

Should anyone decide to try any of these boxes you should be warned that a 10 MB/s link isn't really enough for full capabilities. Streaming video eats that up fast. A 100 MB/s hardwire or 802.11g (54 MB/s wireless) link is the way to go.