DIGITAL HIGH-RES AUDIO SYSTEM -HELP PLEASE
Tim - I have taken a look at the user manual for the Oppo BDP105 and although it appears you can access media files on a NAS drive over a wireless network it starts getting quite complex and if you have never done this type of thing before it can suck the life right out of you. My experience with another media player that used similar techniques and protocols to access data over a LAN was very frustrating and made me adopt a different solution that was much easier to setup and far more elegant to use, but that solution does not address your particular requirements. Since I have no hands on experience of this type of player there is no real advice I can provide. Perhaps other members can assist you Wished I could have been of more assistance :-( Good Luck |
My main concern is sending audio files wirelessly to the Oppo for playback. Does the included wireless dongle on the Oppo allow this?Yes. While I have no experience with Oppo equipment, I'm not sure that it would be as daunting as Willie is anticipating. See page 44 (pdf page 48) of the manual. Note in particular the third method that is indicated: Accessing a SMB/CIFS [e.g., a Microsoft Windows Network] client: the player can directly access files shared through SMB/CIFS clients over the network, as if accessing an external USB hard drive. Most computers, especially those installed with Windows, already have an SMB client embedded. Please refer to respective OS instructions to set up the SMB/CIFS shared file/folder.So if you have the music files on an external USB hard drive connected to the laptop, it seems to me that you would just have to set the properties of the folder containing them to allow them to be shared on the network. Should I just upgrade the internal hd on my laptop to a 1TB unit?No. For a variety of reasons it is generally considered highly preferable to have music files stored on a different drive than the one containing the operating system and program files. Do external 1TB hds exist that are wireless or do they all connect via hardwire into the USB port?Generally only NAS-type devices will provide wireless connectivity for hard drives. Plain old external hard drives connect via either USB (most common), or other wired interfaces such as Firewire, eSATA, and Thunderbolt. Some external drives provide more than one of these interfaces. Ideally, I'd like to locate an added hd next to the Oppo in my rack.Given the foregoing, you could either connect an external USB hard drive directly to the Oppo, and play the files on it via the Oppo, or you could connect the USB hard drive to the laptop and play the files on it via the network wirelessly. Or, since you would have the files stored identically on at least two drives for backup purposes, you could have one drive connected to the Oppo and one connected to the laptop, and play from either. Using a high quality USB-to-S/PDIF converter between the laptop and the Oppo, as Steve suggested, is another alternative, that I suspect would give excellent results but at considerably greater cost. The tradeoff of cost vs. benefit between that and the other approaches would involve differences in the sonic performance of the Oppo through its various interfaces, about which I have no particular knowledge. Regards, -- Al |
Al - I get the impression that Tim's ultimate goal is to have a seperate hard drive next to the Oppo (connected in some manner) and Tim sitting in his listening chair with his laptop, using JRiver to control the next track to play, or downloading song titles to said hard drive and it's all accomplished wirelessly :-) And that's a very reasonable expectation with the technology available today! However, I do not believe this is possible without considerable knowledge of the various protocols cited in the manual and how to set them up on each piece of equipment. Remember "Plug and Pray" :-) From the manual it looks as though it is achievable, but my own personal experience tells me it might not be as straight forward as the manual indicates and it could become very frustrating. I may not be "Super Techie", but I'm a pretty savvy computer user and now use windows and OSX for streaming, which I found very easy to setup by comparison. The media players I tried on the other hand, worked to a fashion, but were very flaky and were sometimes affected by OS releases. The whole setup became labour intensive. As they say - "the devil's in the details" As far as the network stuff, I agree Tim should not suffer dropouts or have issues passing files between devices - once he gets it configured correctly As far as the Oppo is concerned - unfortunately, I have no practical experience to offer that will contribute to an operational solution. Apologies if I'm not too positive on this one - perhaps just a little Media Player battle weary :-) Give me a computer any day - i can tweak them! Regards |
