The Saga: I have recently begun converting my ancient and crusty 33 1/3 vinyl LP collection to CD's with the help of my trusty computer and its CD burner. I'm also converting my old cassette tapes. In total, I have about 150 albums and store-bought CDs. Not a big collection, but big enough.
Of course, once one starts down the road of conversion to a newer tech- nology, all sorts of possibilities arise, and you never know ehere it might lead.
Anyway, unlike most other folks... who did this conversion long ago, I suspect... I seem to find myself right on the cusp of yet another tech- nology generational change. But we are not quite there yet, and it is aggravating me enormously to know that I can't buy the kind of ``music appliance'' that I feel sure will be commonplace in the near future, probably in less than two years.
The bottom line is that as I started to convert my old LPs to CDs, I started looking at various brands and models of what are called ``CD Jukebox'' systems. For those who haven't seen these things, you can see some pictures of a couple of them at the following URLs:
There are at least a half dozen different ``big name'' home audio component manufacturers that make and sell these CD jukebox kinds of things.
Anyway, these things typically come in 100 CD, 200 CD, 300 CD, and 400 CD capacities, and even the smallest ones are big, heavy, and almost certainly slow, e.g. when changing from one CD to the next for playback. (The larger capacity ones... 300 disk and 400 disk... are apparently real monsters, size-wise.)
The more I looked at maybe purchasing one of these CD jukebox things to house and play my not-very-large CD collection... most of which will soon be composed of CD-Rs of converted/digitized/cleaned-up vinyl LPs... the angrier I got. The first shock came when I found out that with the ex- ception of the larger Sony models, the typical CD jukebox can't even playback homemade CD-Rs!!! Jeeezzzz! What idiot thought of that!?!?! In my opinion, this is an incredibly bad engineering design limitation which would probably only have cost, at most, a couple of bucks per unit to avoid. But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! All the Big Name vendors who make these things, including Sony - on their lower-end models, decided instead to scrimp on the capabilities, thus making these things nearly worthless to me.
So anyway, that was my first concern - the lack of CD-R reading capability. More generally however, at some point it dawned on me how utterly idiotic the very concept of these huge, fat, and slow CD jukeboxes has become, now, in this era of Apple iPODs. I mean seriously, the clear wave of the future is to compress all your music, and to strore it on a hard drive. That is exactly what a lot of people do already, and I _know_ that is exactly what we will all be doing within a couple of years, at most, even, and perhaps especially, at home. (iPODs and Rios are swell when I'm out walking, but what amount when I am just veging out on the living-room couch??)
So anyway, I wondered to myself ``Why am I even wasting my time looking at these big, fat, slow, and limited-capability (i.e. no CD-R reading) current-generation CD jukeboxes?'' It makes no sense. I could buy one today, and I will just be giving it to the Salvation Army within 2 years, because it will be essentially worthless ``old'' technology within that time frame, beging replaced with some smaller and faster hard-disk-based solution.
After this idea dawned on me, I set out to look for what would be, in effect, the ``Home Audio Component'' version of an Apple iPOD... something with just a CD drive, for reading in existing CDs (hopefully including CD-Rs) and a big internal hard disk.
The only such thing I found was something called a TDK DA-9000. Here is some info about it:
Anyway, there are problems with this thing too. First and foremost, like the CD jukebox things, it doesn't even know how to read a homemade CD-R! Jeezzzz! How stupid! That alone renders the thing worthless to me. But even if that wasn't a concern, this thing is relatively expensive... It retails for about $300.00 USD. Also, the remote control has no display on it... unlike some of the CD jukeboxes I looked at, which will display the album name and track name in a little LCD window right on the remote control (for the benefit of us couch potatoes). Last but not least, this stupid box doesn't even blend in with the general human-interface scheme of the rest of the home audio & video components that I already own. Yes, it is black, and yes it is 17 inches wide, and yes it has a remote control. But that's where the similarity ends. I already own (1) a stereo receiver and (2) a DVD player and (3) a VCR and (4) a cable TV converter box. Every single one of these has a nice bright *LED* display, with big characters that you can see across the room, but that doesn't detract from the general ambiance of a semi-darkened room. So what did TDK put onto the front of their DA-9000 home audio component? Why, a graringly bright backlit multi- line *LCD* display with characters so tiny that you have to be standing right next to the thing in order to read the display! Like DUH!!!!! Who are the idiots that thought that THIS would be a Good Idea??
There are other problems with the TDK DA-9000 that I won't go into here. These are covered in the various online reviews, and you can Google for those if you are interested. The bottom line is that even though this thing is closer than anything else I have seen, it is still far from my ideal Home Audio Appliance.
So now, where do I go from here? Well, if the Big Names in home audio com- ponents can't or won't build what I need, maybe I can build it myself... or so I figure, at first anyway.
Knowing what I know about computer hardware and software, I figure: No problem! All I have to do is get a suitable 17 inch black enclosure, hopefully with a nice-sized red or green LED display on the front, along with some sort of a IR receiver (for the remote) and then get some nice inexpensive off-the-shelf embedded board... like one of the VIA EDEN boards (even the low-end 300MHZ is probably overkill)... and then just make sure that it's got (a) on-board AC'97 audio and (b) at least one EIDE channel, supporting two drives, i.e. hard disk and a CD drive. (A CD writer could be an upgrade option for more $$$'s.) Then, with these components in hand, I could just slap them together, load up Linux, con- fugure a suitable kernel and a few freeware mp3 utilities, add some small amount of custom software and voila! I'd have my ideal Home Audio Appliance at last. Right?
Wrong! Of course, it ain't that simple.
Getting a nice small (min-ITX or FlexATX, or MicroATX, or perhaps even full-sized ATX) motherboad, with AC'97 audio and IDE support is no problem. Getting a suitably cheap and low-power processor is also no problem. A power supply is easy to lay hands on. Off-the-shelf hard drives (of various capacities) and off-the-shelf CD drives are a piece of cake. The software, in the form of freeware, is almost all out there, written already, and free. I might have to write a small amount of my own new code, but I can handle that. (I'm a software engineer by trade.) So what's the problem?
Well my friends, try as I might, I have been unable to find any suitable black 17-inch-wide *enclosure* for this whole mess. The other parts and pieces are all easy to find, but try finding an off-the-shelf and/or in- expensive 17-inch-wide black computer enclosure. Lotsa luck! The only thing that I found like this is Antec's `Overture' case, which costs (relatively) big bucks AND which is far too fat/tall. Sleek it isn't, and its size makes it almost as bad as the CD jukeboxes that I railed against above. (It also contains a fan, which I hope would be both un- necessary and a pointless waste of money in the kind of fanless design I have in mind.)
This situation... my inability to find just a reasonable 17 inch black en- closure... seems to me to be utter madness! I don't understand why no enterprising enmclosure manufacturer, either in Taiwan or elsewhere, hasn't elected to make and market such a thing. I can see a LOT of possible uses for an enclosure exactly like what I am talking about.
Anyway, searching some more, I found one company, Hust Technologies, in ermany
That ends the sage of my (fruitless) search for what seem to me to be the obvious next generation of home audio appliance. Although all of the other necessary components are readily (and cheaply) available, I'm stymied by the apparent total unavailability of suitable enclosures.
Or so it would seem.
If anybody knows where to obtain a proper sort of enclosure... 17-inch-wide, black, and with an *LED* display an an IR receiver on the front, and one that will accept _some_ standard motherboard form factor... please do let me know. It would still like to build what I have in mind, since nobody else seems to be doing it, at least not at anything close to a reasonble price point (and with CD-R reading capability).
Regards, rfg
P.S. If you e-mail me, and if your e-mail bounces due to the heavy-duty spam filtering here, please accept my apologies (it's nothing personal, I assure you) and please contact me via this web form instead:
P.P.S. This company:
sells a LOT of different small/smallish enclosures, but not a single one of them appears to be 17 inches wide. As noted above, with the exception of the Antec Overture case, nobody does. (It must be a giant right-wing international conspiracy, undoubtedly led by RIAA and the MPAA, to prevent me from enjoying all of my music while laying on the couch!)