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squeezebox and home network

From reading about Squeezebox, it seems such a good idea. However, my computer knowledge is very limited and I hope fellow Audiogoners can help me out a bit.

My home is a recently constructed and it is wired with Cat-5 cable and I can see wall plugs in every room where I can plug in a network cable. The sales manager told me that I can set up a network down in the basement where the cable and telephone wire come in.

If that’s the case, ie, I set up the network and any computer plugged into the wall can join the network, then I can just use Squeezebox Ethernet connection rather than the wireless connection, right? Would that improve sound quality somewhat?

Also, if I rip cd and store them on a hard drive, using EAC, no compression, what’s the size of the hard drive I need to have , say per 200 cd.

Thanks
ddl24

Showing 2 responses by coffee_nudge

coffee_nudge
120 posts
 


I've tried Squeezebox both wired (CAT 5)and wireless. Sound quality was identical as far as I could tell. The only real world difference was that with the wireless, everytime I used the Microwave, I would lose the signal. I've heard that with some wireless phones, the same thing happens. So I switched to wired.

I use EAC, but I compress using FLAC losseless compression (which is supported by Squeezebox) and 200 CDs takes about 65-70 gb. So if you wanted to do it completely uncompressed, I would guestimate that it would take about 35% more space -- close to 90 to 100gb per 200 uncompressed CDs. If someone has actually ripped 200 uncompressed, hopefully they'll chime in with the actual HD space used.

Good Luck.
coffee_nudge
120 posts
 

First, I cannot discern any difference in audio quality between FLAC compressed files and uncompressed files. There are several other threads that talk about this, so you can do a search and find a lot of discussion about FLAC.

Second, Using a 4-5 year old notebook may or may not work with Squeezebox and its software Slimserver. Assuming you are using Windows operating system, I seem to recall that you need to be running minimum of a 733Mhz Pentium on Windows NT/2000/XP. So you might want to check the specs on your notebook.

I know Squeezebox can also be run from a Linux system, but I don't know anything about Linux.

Cheers,
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