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OK, so never mind that I spent my career specifying, operating, maintaining high-tech video/audio gear and everything associated with it. I researched the daylights out of everything new that was available before I spent a penny of my company's money. Then, I retired and started making sawdust (most of the time). The electronics became one of those "been there, done that" aspects of my life. My bad!
When we decided to update the home entertainment system in our family room, I thought, "No big deal!". It's just a TV, some kind of disc player and sound. Yeah, but it's way different than what I bought 10-20 years ago! After much research on just how smart I wanted the TV to be vs having the smarts in a different box, I decided to go with a 55" LG LCD/LED with a full range of I/O and an LG blu-ray player with "Smart TV". Right! A box that's smarter than me! But, it's just a box and I finally read enough of the instructions to get streaming content from the Internet and my home office computer. I'm sure I'll have to change to a higher speed on the cable modem, but that's a quick phone call to LOML (she works at the cable company) followed by a command from their IT folks.
Sound system? We decided on the Bose Cinemate GS Series II system. The quality and room-filling sound that sucker puts out is amazing!
OK, so why am I telling you all of this? One: I've been enjoying the new "inside toys" so much (to say nothing of knocking holes in walls and installing a wall mount, etc.) that I haven't hit a lick on my credenza project all week! And the credenza's original purpose was to hold the new TV on its stand - then we decided to hang it on the wall. Two: I have a seemingly simple decision to make regarding committing our CD collection to a hard drive, mainly for streaming but also for backup. I've done a few CDs for our cars - converting them to MP3 to get several CDs on a disc. Before I spend the time to copy all of our CDs to a hard drive, I'd like some input from those of you who have done more of this than I have.
1. My first thought was doing a direct copy - no compression - of all CDs. Lots of HD space required, though.
2. Save as MP3 at ??? compression rate: 320, 256, 128. Saves space at the expense of data loss.
What say you of the audiophile persuasion?
When we decided to update the home entertainment system in our family room, I thought, "No big deal!". It's just a TV, some kind of disc player and sound. Yeah, but it's way different than what I bought 10-20 years ago! After much research on just how smart I wanted the TV to be vs having the smarts in a different box, I decided to go with a 55" LG LCD/LED with a full range of I/O and an LG blu-ray player with "Smart TV". Right! A box that's smarter than me! But, it's just a box and I finally read enough of the instructions to get streaming content from the Internet and my home office computer. I'm sure I'll have to change to a higher speed on the cable modem, but that's a quick phone call to LOML (she works at the cable company) followed by a command from their IT folks.
Sound system? We decided on the Bose Cinemate GS Series II system. The quality and room-filling sound that sucker puts out is amazing!
OK, so why am I telling you all of this? One: I've been enjoying the new "inside toys" so much (to say nothing of knocking holes in walls and installing a wall mount, etc.) that I haven't hit a lick on my credenza project all week! And the credenza's original purpose was to hold the new TV on its stand - then we decided to hang it on the wall. Two: I have a seemingly simple decision to make regarding committing our CD collection to a hard drive, mainly for streaming but also for backup. I've done a few CDs for our cars - converting them to MP3 to get several CDs on a disc. Before I spend the time to copy all of our CDs to a hard drive, I'd like some input from those of you who have done more of this than I have.
1. My first thought was doing a direct copy - no compression - of all CDs. Lots of HD space required, though.
2. Save as MP3 at ??? compression rate: 320, 256, 128. Saves space at the expense of data loss.
What say you of the audiophile persuasion?