skeetso

my post got chopped off again after the letters LP...but thank you bluesman david.

Right-on tranz and thank you. Concise, airy, and to the point.

Very nice bluesman David..Shout out to tranz also for simple and neat conciseness ....I think we're getting somewhere now. Thanks for not giving me the obvious 'stock' answers that I've read about ad nauseum concerning computer audio. It's funny and coincidental that you mentioned David Hafler. Just today, after I had submitted that last long comment, I was thinking about how my first stereo sounded in my bedroom at home where I grew up as a young teenager.. My older brother handed down to me a Dynaco preamp and 60W Dynaco amp which he built from kits. These were Hafler units. With these, he gave me a Dual turntable and a pair of Dynaco bookshelf speakers, each one having a 10 inch woofer and a tweeter, the tweeter I think was made in Scandinavia, maybe SEAS, i think it was. I now own some of the same CDs of which I had the LP from back then. From the LPs played on this system in my bedroom came sheer authentic musical joy. By comparing the CD years later from the memory I had of the same music on LP

pardon my awkwardness at this. the last time (and first time) i made a reply, whenever i hit the send button, i got a message that said i didn't have permission to do something. maybe i took too long to think about and edit my message so i will be succinct from now on. Tomorrow, May 29th, is my birthday, and I will turn 59. The reason i mention this is because i am old enough to have gone down the high end conventional route and all the way back. I got burnt out with audio "flavors of the month" several years ago. I never ceased loving music however. i am a long time music collector with about a thousand LPs which I have now moved neatly into a backroom along with about 750 Redbook CDs which are also neatly stored away. Because of my frustration with 4000 dollar Arcam CD players, and the like, and enjoying music less and less, I shit-canned everything and began listening to music via YouTube videos with earbuds of which are in now as i type on this macbook pro retina laptop. I am also a practicing Electrical Engineer, and have been for about 27 years. My specific training and the work I do is on high voltage distribution systems for the power company that i have been working for, for the whole time. In other, it's power electrical work, like the power lines that go down your street leading up to the transformer that runs your house. This is a different animal than 'electronics' of which this forum studies. I do understand computers very well so please don't hold back with anything, I will get it. For instance, i really wonder if dbpoweramp, EAC, etc. really are worth it. Shouldn't a very high quality optical drive do the trick? Maybe, maybe not, I'm open and I want to start on a clean page. The first task, as you say is accurate ripping. I have done this about 3 and a half times and now have nothing to show for it for various reasons. We have hurricanes here in Louisiana. I don't need to do baby steps. I have a Benchmark DAC and 2 more older ones in the closet. I DO HOWEVER NEED A STEP BY STEP PROCESS AS I WILL ONLY RIP ONE MORE TIME. I may actually rip twice all at once because i'm considering separate and parallel mac and pc systems, which like different Codecs. I want to go directly to advanced equipment mode. i am even considering for one system a mac pro with 8 cores of xeon processing and 32 mb ram. If and when i do that i would want an optical drive thunderbolt connected. Forget this for now though because my mixed feelings tell me to go for a very light weight and fleet footed system. Xeon processors are powerful as hell, but maybe a mismatch for this task we are doing here. The intel i7s could be better. I simply please need a process and an equipment scenario. Many of the terms I see here are foreign sounding, but as I said I am a fast learner. Another for instance, should I rip to the internal HDD or SSD and then transfer it to an external drive or should I rip directly to the external? I have no particular preference for players since we are now starting on a clean white page. I need you folks and will trust you folks to steer me right. Not to sound crappy, but I can afford it, but get the strong feeling that less is more.....thank so much....i hope i can submit this whole rant....thanks again

Wow thanks but my laptop (on which I am writing this) has no optical drive, unless you're talking about connecting an external optical drive to my laptop or any laptop for that matter). This sounds very interesting and really at this point, I can really try anything, since at the moment I'm at ground zero, meaning I have no system, just a lot of CDs. About the rest of the stuff you mentioned, I would need to go slower with more explanation of that. Yes, really never mind on what I think/thought I needed according to this my first comment here as well as my first response. BTW, to change gears for a minute here, since I just registered here to interact on this website for the first time today, and don't understand fully how this blog works, I must ask, can others see this response and well as your reply to me or did you send me this privately? It's ok for me either way. I just need to know better when I am broadcasting to the large group versus speaking privately. OK, now back to the subject. Since I will be doing a lot of work ripping all these CDs, etc., I didn't mean to sound like I needed a quick and easy setup. I am willing to spend time and money for this project.

I was wondering if I could get a suggested PC based setup in order to make an organized library out of my CD collection? What I will have to do is manually rip approx.750 discs onto a PC and use J. River as the player (I think). I am willing to spend 3-4 thousand dollars on the DAC if I have to. [i will use powered monitors after the [/color]DAC, but again I'm not sure whether to control the volume from the DAC or from the player software via a cell phone or a tablet of some kind. This means I wouldn't need a volume control on the DAC.] As of now, I don't know how to do all that, but I am a fast learner. I would really love to buy a pocket server I've seen on the site, but I don't quite understand how you rip the music into it without an optical drive or how the music gets organized into an accessible library. I really love the minimalism of these units (I know it's important to have it simple and quiet). The prices are great too. Anyway, I want to maybe be able to download high rez music files after i finish with my own CDs. I've never done this, but I've read they're great. I'm also not exactly sure how to reconcile the fact that I want to be able to see and hear very high quality concert DVDs on a high def TV and keep it simple and quiet too. I have been delaying doing a setup because I haven't been able to find the balance between clean minimalism of music only and the added necessity of seeing and hearing high bitrate video and audio concerts. This means blu-ray. Is it possible to get a scenario for what I need from the front end of the system to the DAC including external drive(s)? My front end, storage, and DAC budget is about 7-8 thousand dollars max if need be. I will spec out cables, amps, and speakers and probably go XLR out of the DAC. Thank you very much.