Help with turning AV Amp into music centre

D

Deleted member 174041

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I have alot of experience with AV equipment but not stereo.

I want to use my amp to play stereo Music (Any lossless file) but I dont have a source to use.

I dont have a cd player and I've sold my PS4 so nothing to play back on.

I'm after external storage which can be connected to my amp via digital/analog but not usb.

I have no idea where to start. Thanks

Oh and nothing over £200, cheaper is better.
 
Which AV amp is it?
How do you plan to select an play music - from the device?
Where is the music kept at the moment?
If its a laptop or pc you already have the device which you can connect using its 3.5mm headphone output to the amp.

If you are capable with a soldering iron and iup for the challenge you could build a raspberry pi

Building a Raspberry Pi Squeezebox Player for £100

Not read the thread myself but i know it is possible to build one with optical or analogue output.

Or another alternative could be a second hand smart phone that its media player supports lossless. They have fair size storage, built in media player and has analogue output, albeit not the greatest dac.
 
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Which AV amp is it?
How do you plan to select an play music - from the device?
Where is the music kept at the moment?
If its a laptop or pc you already have the device which you can connect using its 3.5mm headphone output to the amp.

If you are capable with a soldering iron and iup for the challenge you could build a raspberry pi

Building a Raspberry Pi Squeezebox Player for £100

Not read the thread myself but i know it is possible to build one with optical or analogue output.

Or another alternative could be a second hand smart phone that its media player supports lossless. They have fair size storage, built in media player and has analogue output, albeit not the greatest dac.

Hi Don Dadda, Thanks for your reply...

Amp is a Yamaha RX-V1900 so a pretty decent amp. Im hoping for something thats similar to a ps3/ps4 in that I add all my music files to a built in hardrive, and select music using a remote control.

I dont mind if the display is on the tv or on the unit itself.

Music is kept on a pc in a seperate room. I dont like the idea of 3.5mm jack as music will be compromised.

Dont want the hassle of building anything myself.
 
I use a WDTV Live Hub (has a 1tb drive in it) that holds all my music and some films etc.

It's wired into both the TV and my amp.

You can obviously control it all through the TV to play music and films but I also use BubbleUPNP on various Android devices that means I can play music through the amp without the TV being on.

You should be able to do the same with a WDTV Live box and just plug HDDs into it via USB.
 
I use a WDTV Live Hub (has a 1tb drive in it) that holds all my music and some films etc.

It's wired into both the TV and my amp.

You can obviously control it all through the TV to play music and films but I also use BubbleUPNP on various Android devices that means I can play music through the amp without the TV being on.

You should be able to do the same with a WDTV Live box and just plug HDDs into it via USB.

That looks just the thing im after. Do you use optical or RCA to connect to tv?
 
Hmm, can't recall exactly but most likely:
WD to TV via HDMI
WD to Amp via RCA
TV to Amp via RCA
This way I can get any combination of 2 components or all 3.

My Amp is old school so no optical for it.
 
A WDTV will get job done. Don't know why I didn't think of it as I have 2 which I use for streaming films from my Nas.
Not that I use it for music but it does support lossless flac and aac.

As above with connections but since you a formidable AV in the Yamaha with what I would of thought be a very good dac, the easiest way would be to connect the WDTV using hdmi to AV amp.

If you don't mind secondhand, there are plenty on The bay or on here in the classifieds going for , on average, £35-£40

For Sale - WDTV Live (C3H) - in good condition

Or you have mede8er media streamer which same or similar as the wdtv but slightly more expensive.

Mede8er - The greatest show on earth

For budget you could have one with a built in hdd
 
What about using my Blu ray player? Didn't think of that. It has usb and SD card slot.
 
Depends on model of player and what formats it's supports but it's worth a try.
 
I'll give it a try. If it does work i've got a choice of either connecting to amp either with optical, RCA or as its connected now, HDMI.

And I'll need to figure if its best to store music on external hardrive or SD card.
 
You will need to check which plays what format as they may not be the same
 
You will need to check which plays what format as they may not be the same

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Looks like I can only use USB for mp3 which is strange.
 
Thought so. Not really strange as it is quite common for blu Rays to supports different formats on different media. It is what it is I'm afraid.

More importantly, it does not support lossless formats
 
320kbs is the best you can have for MP3 and no there isn't a lossless MP3 format.

MP3 is, first and foremost, a compression format designed to massively reduce the amount of data required to represent an audio recording and still sound true (almost true) to the original recording.
Well we know the last part of that is utter rubbish as they can strip the life out of a recording but there are some very decent MP3's out there, even at 128kbs.
 
Well at least there is some hope then. To be honest I probably wouldnt be able to tell the difference between lossless and 320kbs anyway.

At least I've solved my op. Just need to look out for a decent hard drive now.
 
Before you run out and by a external hard drive, put a few tunes on a usb stick and see how it fairs operational wise with that.
 
The only problem with digital inputs is that they won't play through zones 2 & 3 if you want them to.
Have you looked into the Chromecast Audio. I have all my music stored on a Synology NAS and play it through the Chromecast using my phone as a control interface, this also allows me to use apps like Spotify in the same way too. I'm sure there will be an app out there that will allow Chromecast to stream the music already stored on your pc providing you have Wi-Fi and the pc is on the same network
 
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Works perfectly fine using a usb stick. Sounds ok to me.

I'll give it a test and compare the outputs to the amp now and see if I notice any difference.
 

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