Home networked appliance of the year (OK, decade)

[Originally posted as a news item on 27th February 2003, re-edited to be a story on 19th March 2003]

I got my SliMP3 (PC-as-infinite-jukebox-streaming-MP3-to-livingroom-HiFi) at Christmas... so this is something of a long-term user report. 

So many of the reviews said "This ROCKS!"...  so I took the plunge.  The motivitation had come a few weeks earlier: I was getting pissed off at the fact that it was easier to have a fantastic jukebox in your pocket these days than it was to have one in your living room... no fair!  In a nutshell, this reverses that trend.  I was also getting pissed off at the fact that I was being asked to make quality tradeoffs-- this technology should be enhancing the listening experience, rather than giving me lossy compression just to save a few lousy terabytes, now that disk space is so cheap (!).  Oh, and I was also getting pissed off by the fact that I had so many empty CD cases... where do those damn things go???  So I found a good value-for-money solution:

1. Hardware: SliMP3.  Simple, and gorgeous.  Black box, power, left'n'right RCA hi-fi out, RJ-45... that's it. WOOOHOOO.  This is how an appliance should be. Lovely display & remote so you can read it all the way across the room, etc.  Just right.  Open source, plenty of hacks: one guy has done a BBC news ticker for it, etc. Nice!

2. Connection: big long ethernet cable down to the living room.  Well, OK, so I cheated: got a Linksys WET-11 wireless ethernet bridge which acts just like the same thing... cool!  Setup was not too painful (I'll post my tips one day).

3. Rip those CDs: After a tour of the rivals, I settled on the fanatic's choice: EAC (Exact Audio Copy) with one of many optional encoders, the other fanatic's choice: LAME .  You can tweak it in endless ways, but it also comes with some lovely presets: standard, extreme, and insane (seriously)... typically 128Kbps, 256Kbps, 320Kbps variable bit rate encoding or average bit rate encoding... you choose.  I got some further advice from a few audiophiles, which I'll add here when I can remember where they are... but in essence at the extreme and insane settings you cannot tell the difference from the original CD, and you get about 5:1 compression on average... I did numerous control & double-blind experiments in my living room and could not distinguish, so that's all that matters for me... but note that you could also use FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), once the hackers out there have written the appropriate transcoders to convert on the fly to MP3... (yes, there are rival devices that work with .WAV, but are undesireable for other reasons). 

4. Enjoy: My listening pleasure and frequency of using my living room hi-fi have gone up a few orders of magnitude.  Indeed I'm now shopping for a new amp & speakers to really enjoy the stuff better.  I'm mostly re-encoding my own CD's... got fed up with poor quality and bogus MP3s grabbed over the Internet... I don't mind paying for the tracks, just want an infinite jukebox thank you very much, and full albums at the original quality.

Long-term conclusion: "This ROCKS" is a woeful understatement.  It's the future of home entertainment... and a glimpse at what a good simple appliance can be.

Last update: 19/03/2003; 11:13:55.