IT’S only a mild case of audiophilia, according to the professionals, but it’s causing me significant discomfort.
Until recently I had considered my appreciation of good-sounding music more boon than bane, but the moment my wife and I decided to move, I acquired a harsh new perspective.
I possess a fairly nice stereo (not a problem) and some 2,500 CDs (a significant problem, according to my wife), but the biggest problem is the custom-built cabinet I commissioned to house my music. It sits on an astounding 20 percent of the usable space in our living room. I’m unwilling to subject our new house to that sort of treatment.
I have resisted converting my CDs to the MP3 digital format for two reasons. The thought of feeding discs into my computer, one by excruciating one (I believe this was the ninth labor of Hercules), not to mention organizing it once it is digitized, is painful just to contemplate. More important, I’m entirely unwilling to sacrifice sound quality in return for less clutter.
Recently, however, trends have been working in my favor. Data storage prices are in perpetual free fall — at 50 cents a gigabyte, even giant hard drives are within most budgets — and the FLAC (free lossless audio codec) audio format has gained widespread embrace by mainstream media hardware manufacturers. Like MP3, FLAC is a compression standard for music files, but unlike MP3, it is lossless, meaning it doesn’t degrade sound quality. With it, I could fit 3,000 CDs in a terabyte of storage.
These are details about which my wife does not care. What she is passionate about is floor space. I set about seeing how to help us both.
First stop was Logitech in Mountain View, Calif.
Logitech recently bought Slim Devices, which makes the Squeezebox, a handy little $299 unit about half the size of my desktop keyboard. It relays music from computer to stereo system and then, if the user so wishes, around the rest of the house.
It’s a viable solution, but it still puts me back at my computer, ripping my CDs while I grind my teeth down to the nerve. Even if I outsource the job, with ripping services like Ready to Play (www.readytoplay.com) and Riptopia (www.riptopia.com) that charge about $1.60 or so for each disc, that’s an extra $2,500.
Logitech makes three products — the Squeezebox, the $399 Squeezebox Duet and the $1,999 Transporter — which do more or less the same thing at varying levels of quality.
The first two items are extremely compact. The Duet receiver is just two-thirds the size of the Squeezebox. The Transporter offers a higher quality of sound from a typical size stereo component. All three connect wirelessly to the server — in most cases, a computer — and must be run through an amplifier or powered speakers.
A similar wireless audio-streaming device is the Zone Player 100 ($499) from Sonos, based in Santa Barbara, Calif. Unlike the Logitech devices, it has an integrated amplifier, so all one needs is an audio source and a pair of speakers. For those who prefer to power their music through an existing stereo system, the Zone Player 80 ($349) is an amp-free alternative. Each unit is commanded through a feature-laden remote control ($399), complete with scroll wheel and full-color screen.
While Sonos does a capable job of retrieving one’s own stored music, the company is banking on users obtaining music online, both from services like Rhapsody and Napster — which are essentially fee-based online jukeboxes — and Internet radio.
But I did not build a CD collection just to ignore it. More exploration was in order. Second stop was the high-end test drive.
There is little argument that McIntosh makes among the best — and most expensive — audio components. So when the company came out with the MS750 last year, my ears perked up. Knowing much of the $6,000 price tag was going toward a level of sound quality that may well be lost on my good-but-not-great stereo system, I proceeded with caution.
From an ease-of-use standpoint, the McIntosh was exactly what I was looking for. A simple interface allows for automatic CD ripping (into FLAC or a variety of other formats) in about four minutes.
“I have people write in all the time and say, ‘You know, I could do the same thing with a $400 computer and this program or that program,’ ” said Ron Cornelius, a McIntosh project manager. “And they’re absolutely right — they can. But try to use it every day. If you’re not a computer geek, forget it. It’s just not a friendly portal.”