3 ways to MP3 your home
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by: Guest
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1. Wired or wireless hi-fi connection
MP3’s are no longer just ‘on-the-move’ thing. There are now ways to play music stored on your computer through your existing hi-fi. The simplest way is via an analogue connection – using a 3.5mm – jack-to-phono cable.
This can be done either straight from your MP3 player’s headphone socket to your amp, or by connecting the internal soundcard in your PC to your hi-fi. But there’s no reason to settle for an analogue connection: a digital hook-up to your home cinema receiver or amp is much more exciting. All you need is an optical or electrical link from soundcard to receiver. Or you could go wireless…
Let’s look at Apple’s solution: you need a wi-fi-enabled computer, which may require a card or adaptor of some sort. The AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi card is a good one at £60.
The computer is the hub for your network and the home of all your music, while the wi-fi card allows it to talk to the base station that’s picking up the signal and redistributing it to your hi-fi. Which base station to use? Sticking with Apple, the Award-winning Airport Express at £99 is a good bet – a clever device that plugs straight into any mains socket, and then connects to your hi-fi amp or a pair of powered speakers. It comes with all the software you need, and is simple to set up and use.
2. Multiroom music systems
The Apple system already mentioned is sort of a data network made hi-fi friendly, but there’s a growing number of products dedicated to sharing music around your home. Several manufacturers make multiroom music servers, which are essentially mass-storage devices for music files designed to play music out into several zones at once.
These can be connected, using cables, to client units around the home, or they can do the same trick wirelessly. Some work on conventional 802.II-type wireless network; others, such as the Sonos Music Player system, work on dedicated wireless mesh systems, thus keeping the music as pure as possible.
3. Media Centres
So you store your MP3 files on your computer – why not go the whole way and use it as a central hub for music, movies, still pictures, TV viewing and recording as well as the usual internet browsing and e-mail.
It’s not hard these days, thanks to Microsoft’s Windows Media Center Edition operating system and software. And while this will run on just about any modern computer, hardware manufacturers have now embraced the multimedia world with units equipped with enhanced sound and video cards, and a control interface better suited to the needs of the general user, not just PC nerds.
Connect one of these computers to your plasma or LCD screen, or indeed a projector, and it becomes your DVD player/recorder as well as a library for all your media. Amazing!
Related: 3 ways to MP3 your home
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In a few places in the world prototype optical exchange facilities are build to learn to provide these new application.
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