It’s All About the Sources (Part One)

So what problem are homeowners trying to solve when they invest thousands of dollars in audio/video systems for their homes? Whether we initially know it or not, we are trying to achieve the convenience of having every audio/video source that we have, available to us in most rooms in the house. This requires the distribution of the audio/video signals and their control, to multiple locations. So, you see? It really is all about the sources.

For many, achieving this with simplicity is the priority. For others, having the highest performance is the highest priority. The good news is that, as discussed in my previous blog post, those two objectives are no longer mutually exclusive. IP technology now allows us to achieve the best of both worlds. The focus of this post, however, will be on the sources themselves, and mostly I will talk about the sources that I have personally experienced over the last few years. Since I anticipated that this blog post would be a little long, I broke it out into a couple of different posts for easier reading and digesting.

AM /FM Tuners: Even though this is the least used source now-a-days, every multi-room system should include this basic source; if for nothing else than to stay in touch with the world if you were to ever lose your TV services. It’s also a ‘must have’ source if you enjoy talk radio.

iPod Docking Station: One of the new and coolest sources available is an iPod docking station. My favorite is made by a Sonance company called iPort, who pioneered the in-wall iPod docking station, although they do also make a desktop iPod docking station as well. Kids especially, love this source because they or their friends can drop in a personal iPod, or now iPhone, and listen to their music in all rooms or in any room in the house. Although this is a very convenient audio source, you must recognize that this source will not provide you the best audio quality available for your chosen music, for two reasons: a) the player itself only outputs analog audio at this time, and b) the music stored in your iPod/iPhone is typically heavily compressed (MP-3 or AAC) and not capable of delivering the experience you get when listening to the music directly from the CD, which stores the audio in an uncompressed audio format – WAV. However, it is a very cool source.

Music Server: Music servers are for users that have, or plan to have, a large collection of CDs and they want a very simple and realizable way of ripping their CDs, storing them, organizing them, selecting them and finally playing their favorite music. Some of the music servers offer a rich user interface focused on offering you the best in selection process and meta-data (songs, artists, genre, playlist, composer, and more) available. These servers come with one or multiple outputs, but when used with NetStreams IP-based DigiLinX system, we are able to extract up to 6 simultaneous, digital streams from the top servers in the market. This is the same as having six music servers that six different users can manipulate.

Internet Radio: Internet Radio has been around for a while, especially for those of us that are a little techno geeky, but it hadn’t become main stream because it was difficult to use at first, there were no standards, stations were changing and moving locations too fast, and you could only listen to Internet Radio on a computer. Most of this has changed now. Although this emerging industry still lacks a unified standard, there is a lot of convergence going on, and this source is becoming easier to use. More importantly, Internet Radio is no longer exclusive to computers. Many music server companies have now integrated Internet Radio with their music servers and more are working on the same. A few companies have rolled out a standalone Internet Radio that looks and behaves more like a consumer electronic product.

Networked Attached Storage (NAS): For the slightly or advanced techno savvy users, or for those that are PC centric, networked attached storage has become a real option as prices have dropped to a point that for under $900, you can now store more music in WAV (uncompressed) than most people will ever own in their lifetime. Of course you know that this will be under $500 by this time next year. Networked attached storage gives you redundancy is also not limited to music. It can store pictures, movies and your computer data files too.

I personally own a 2TB Buffalo NAS, which I recently paid $800 for. It is very small, about the size of a toaster. Two years ago I bought a 1TB LaCie NAS and that one cost me $1,500, and was so big that it almost did not fit in my equipment rack. Depending on which multi-room audio system you use, your installer will integrate your NAS in different ways.

With my DigiLinX system, I used a product that NetStreams makes called “Streaming Music Manager (SMM)”, which basically proxies up to 6 different streams of music, and their meta-data and control, and makes it available to any number of rooms that the user selects. The SMM not only discovers my music stored in the NAS device, but if I wish, it can also auto discover music available on any computer or other storage devices on my computer network. It simply aggregates all of the music into one list for our users to select from. To store the music into our NAS device, I simply set ‘Media Player’ and ‘iTunes’, to point to the NAS device for all storage. Make sure to also set it to store in the WAV format.

This is a very cool way to rip, store and play your music indeed, but for those that don’t have any computer experience or want to see and select from the richest meta-data available, I would recommend that you consider a music server instead. If you are interested in a music server, I recommend that you look at the Naim Audio and Qsonix servers, which I hope to test soon and blogging about. You might also want to look at Escient and Audio ReQuest. All of the above integrate with DigiLinX. Naim Audio servers actually have NetStreams technology built in and can stream directly to any StreamNet enabled IP speaker or IP amplifier.

Herman Cárdenas

If my blog has been helpful to you in any way, or if you have any comments or questions, please drop me a note. I would love to hear from you: hermansblog@netstreams.com