sonos vs squeezebox

could that also be read as ‘whatre the advantages of a separate squeezebox?’? if youre happy with your mac being your media player then thats the same as me using my laptop isnt it? not fully sure i understand you.
i would be ripping cds to either the ickle pc or ‘laptop to nas’ and then using the ickle pc to stream to hifi. at least thats how im understanding it with my limited knowledge. happy to be put straight on this tho 🙂

I suppose so, yes. In my experience people are often naive of what their existing kit can do. Windows Media Player is a DLNA server (so no need for something like Twonky). Many modern TVs/Blu Ray players/Games consoles are DLNA clients so most people already have the kit to stream from their PC/Mac to at least their lounge. Unless you want multi-room streaming I’m not sure why you need Sonos and I don’t really know much about Squeezebox.

My iPhone can access my entire iTunes library simply by turning on Home Sharing in iTunes provided I’m in wireless range. Nothing more than a couple of button clicks and my whole library can be played anywhere I can plug my iPhone in. Not really an audiophile solution, but pretty powerful. Like I said in a previous post, I believe THE most important thing is the client you use to browse and play your library. If that’s a pain to use and find your music, you’ll regret the money you’ve spent, so it’s worth a demo if you can.

Unless you want multi-room streaming I’m not sure why you need Sonos and I don’t really know much about Squeezebox.

I can stream music from my laptop to my Sony blu-ray player. Unfortunately, the sound quality isn’t amazing, and the menu system on the Sony makes it difficult to access particular tracks. Presumably, Squeezebook would improve on this?

and the menu system on the Sony makes it difficult to access particular tracks. Presumably, Squeezebook would improve on this?

Exactly. I have a Sony BD player and don’t generally use the streaming because of this. Instead I use my iPhone as a client that I simply plug direct into my amp. However, for the OP it might be fine to work with what he’s got as a cheap and cheerful start. Otherwise get to a decent shop, get a demo and find the system that gives you what you need, since it can get a bit mind-boggling focusing on the technical side.

First off I’m no expert in all this it’s just something that I’ve been playing around with at home.

as far as that small pc, wouldnt that just cost the same (maybe more) than a squeezebox? or are you suggesting it for the versatility of vids and photos as well?
Yes it would probably cost a bit more than the Squeezbox (but less than the Sonos) but my reasons are more to replace all the various boxes in my living room with one box and more importantly one interface whilst at the same time adding a bit more functionality like iPlayer and movie streaming. Don’t get me wrong I like the look of the squeezebox touch and have been considering one for a while now as our stereo is in a separate room to the TV etc. so I’ll need another interface anyway.

just had a look at windows media centre and pointed it towards my music folders. how do i connect it to amp? what leads to which connections?
Depends on what connections you have on your laptop/amp. At the very least you could connect the headphone socket on the laptop to one of the pairs of RCA inputs (Aux or CD) on the amp.

and are you saying those phone apps will ‘find’ my laptop running media centre and play my music through the amp without me touching laptop? i ask as my ‘connected media’ app cant find my laptop.
Yes although I have never tried them myself. I believe there are two parts to it though, an app for the phone and a small programme to run on your laptop. Have a read here for the info
http://www.remotepotato.com/about.aspx

The biggest issue is for me the usability of the client.
Agreed, that’s why I don’t like Windows Media Centre. I’m currently trying out XBMC as I prefer the interface and it’s supposed to be much faster.

mjb, just been following your link on that pc and reading up on it. i hadnt considered a ‘media centre’ pc as such, and im interested in it now. but….. it looks like it needs me to get separate drive/ memory etc and instal everything myself. am i right?
Yep you’d need a hard drive(I’m considering a 60gb SSD to keep everything silent (~£80)), some memory (~£12), possibly a DVD/Blueray player, and an operating system (Linux is free). However, I believe that you can buy them with the parts already installed although you may be limited to certain drives etc.

might be too fiddly for me to do, id prefer something that works out the box. can you advise me on this?
Pretty much any PC could be used as long as it can handle HD streaming and playback. Some manufacturers even label them as HTPCs although i don’t know what software they use nor if they will do everything you want. Larger ones tend to be more versatile (you can fit extra cards like TV tuners internally, you could include the storage here instead of in a NAS) but I like the idea of this as it’s cheap, small and quiet. Have a read of these articles to give you an idea of what people are doing with them
http://breden.org.uk/2010/09/22/shuttle-xs35gt-the-ultimate-silent-media-center-htpc/
http://lifehacker.com/5391308/build-a-silent-standalone-xbmc-media-center-on-the-cheap

am i right in thinking this pc would be a box instead of a squeezebox,
Yes

that would play flac to the same quality (good DAC?) yet also play vids, youtube, internet radio…..in fact everything im likely to need?
No the DAC won’t be as good. Try connecting your laptop to the stereo and see how it sounds, if it’s not good enough for you then you’d need to by a standalone DAC.

yet also play vids, youtube, internet radio…..in fact everything im likely to need?
In theory yes, probably not straight out of the box though. I guess you could think of these as media centre software doing the core work and then lots of add ons being written by various people (some official some not) to do the more specialist work. Some things like accessing music and videos should be as simple as pointing the software to the right folder, some like youtube, iPlayer access might require installing a plugin and some like watching/recording live tv might require a fair bit more work and a few visits to the forums to get working. That’s one of the reasons why I suggest you try things out on your laptop first to see if you can get it all working as you want without spending any money. Start with the basics and then add on various upgrades, you should be good at that being a mountain biker!

What’re the advantages of having a separate media centre PC? I don’t get the idea of having a box tucked away somewhere as a media server because I don’t understand how you then rip CD’s onto it quickly and easily.
For me I want to replace my old sky box, noisy PVR and DVD player and also get access to iPlayer, 4OD etc, stream movies from Lovefilm and access movies and music on my NAS. I want to do this all with one cheap, small and quiet box through a single interface and so far I haven’t found an off the shelf box that meets all these requirements. I’ll rip CDs/DVDs using my laptop and store them on the NAS, the HTPC will access them from there, the plan is not to store anything on the HTPC except recorded TV.

I’ve had a squeezebox for a couple of years and hardly used it. It does work but takes a while to rescan my itunes library (admittedly itunes may be the problem!). I recently bought an airport express and now can easily stream music from my macbook or iphone through my amp & speakers. You don’t mention apple above so the squeezebox might work better for you. My pal has sonos and it is much slicker (and more ££).

Bit confused by this – your squeezebox doesn’t do the rescanning, your music server does – the squeezebox just initiates it at your command, but you can set it to rescan each night and only re-scan new or changed files, which takes a few seconds rather than a few minutes.

I wanted a media centre but concluded that I don’t want a big power hungry server machine running 24/7 just so that occasionally I could play some music in the kitchen or record a TV show, especially considering the cost of the individual music points required in each room too.

except recorded TV.

Ah-ha. This is the bit I’ve managed without since iPlayer et al.

my 2p.

I use Squeezebox but have a dedicated server installed on an Intel Atom micro ATX – so it’s about 25cm x 25 cm, with a laptop 1Tb drive in it, very good on power and Squeezecentre has a plug-in to shut the server down and wake it up when required or not in use. Much better performance than running on a NAS plus you can upgrade it whenever required.

Then install http://vortexbox.org/ this installs Squeezecentre, plus a load of other stuff, lets you rip disks direct from the server, music or DVD’s to FLAC mp3 or whatever. This is all free Linux based.

It’s literally a case of putting the cd in and away you go.

Vortexbox really was the missing link in my previous Squeezebox setup.

I,ve just come across this which looks like it might be pretty good.

I wish… http://www.cyrusaudio.com/products/streaming-music-players

Like I said in a previous post, I believe THE most important thing is the client you use to browse and play your library. If that’s a pain to use and find your music, you’ll regret the money you’ve spent,

very true mate, whatever i end up with, i want it to be intuitive, and easy for everyone to browse albums, artists etc. that really is one of the important criteria. as well as the quality of course 🙂

The biggest issue is for me the usability of the client.
Agreed, that’s why I don’t like Windows Media Centre. I’m currently trying out XBMC as I prefer the interface and it’s supposed to be much faster.

just installed xbmc on my laptop to see what i think. first impressions are that its big and clumsy, with a slow mouse pointer. big bright visualisations on it, i dont like it yet. im sure theres ways of fine tuning and having a blank screen instead of all that stuff, but i havent found it yet. for some reason my list of tracks has turned into ‘big icons’ which i dont like and cant find how to switch them back. so….. not too intuitive? ill carry on with it for a while. plans are to hook laptop up to amp and see how i get on with sound quality of flacs agains standalone cd player. if its all good, im gonna look into the link from mjb (acer aspire revo) as a media centre.

i started thinking i was forgetting my original focus for a while, which was simply ripping cds to flac, and streaming them to my hifi. now ive got all these possibilities for video too using a ‘media centre’, im not sure which way to go 🙂

still havent finished reading these links yet, so thanks to everyone for your advice, and im going to catch up on them all now.

i want it to be intuitive, and easy for everyone to browse albums, artists etc

Don’t dimiss Apple TV then, if you want the music and movies. PC World often have them on demo. I believe you do need to use iTunes tho’, but then I’ve never had an issue with that.

mate, my wife was p*ssed off enough that i gave my ipod classic away. if i said that i was to consider using apple again……. 😀

nah, just think theyre overpriced for the name, i dont like syncing, just want to stay away from them. thanks tho 🙂

sorry subsonic didnt work for you, a lot of this technology is still being developed and a few years from now will be standard on your phone, tv etc and lot cheaper, easier to use and readily available. but at the moment a lot of this stuff needs some effort.

mjb has some good ideas for the htpc hardware, so thought id post up what i think has the best potential for a large nas setup, tucked away in a cupboard upstairs or something.

note the £100 cash back.

http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421

fantastic piece of kit for the money to store all your media.

could you explain any +’s and -‘s of that product against mjbs suggestion please mate? this one.

not techy enough to pick the bones myself 🙂

first test over, and im dissapointed. laptop connected to amp with jack plug in headphone socket, leading to red/white plugs in the aux socket on amp. will i be able to hear difference im thinking? minimal? bloody hell there was a BIG difference.
i had cd in cd player running alongside same cd ripped to flac on laptop using winamp, and was switching from aux to cd on the amp. laptop sounded fine i thought, nice beefy sound. until i switched to cd player, and it just sounded soooooo much clearer and louder.
so…..what will have been the difference here do you think? laptops DAC? the cable from laptop to amp? it certainly surprised me how much worse it was.
and more importantly, would this drop in quality be expected from any of these media centre or squeezebox setups?

Laptop – jack of all trades
CD player – designed to play CDs

A CD player consists of a transport that reads the CD and a DAC that converts the 1s and 0s. Both elements can make a difference and I suspect both elements will be considerably better in your CD player than your laptop.

If the difference in quality is unbearable, you’ve answered the question of whether quality is important or not. For many the convenience of these systems outweighs the lesser quality.

ok…….quality is important 😀

more so now ive noticed the difference like that. at first maybe not so as i thought differences would be minimal. that difference is too important for me to ignore.

A decent DAC should make up most of the difference SEP…and FWIW:

that would play flac to the same quality (good DAC?) yet also play vids, youtube, internet radio…..in fact everything im likely to need?
No the DAC won’t be as good. Try connecting your laptop to the stereo and see how it sounds, if it’s not good enough for you then you’d need to by a standalone DAC.

You can get audiophile DACS for PCs – M-audio is £30 odd on flebay. I’ve not compared them though.

And if I can ask another Q of the experts on this….I’ve recently gone the squeezebox route, and also plugged my old Dell desktop into my telly (for VOD) but it’s moisey as ****. It also hosts my external 1TB HDD with my lossless music on. I guess I can put some acoustic deadening around it but is there a better way of getting it quiet for “serious listening sessions” other than replacing with a media centre thingy like that ebuyer one? (presumably these are quieter?)

Right, I’ve just unpacked and set up a pair of Acoustic Energy speakers and a Squeezebox Touch. It took longer to cable up the speakers and fit a euro plug to it than it did set up the Squeezebox ( which is pulling music from a QNAP NAS ).

I am rather impressed, and wondering if another Squeezebox for my home office might not be a good idea.

At the moment it is playing MP3s but there is now a copy of Exact Audio Copy on my PC and the plan is to re-rip everything to FLAC.

😆 😆 😆

whats that? looks lovely. bet its a pretty penny tho 🙁

Naim HDX, which through a variety of life choices counts as work 🙂 I like to think they’re reassuringly expensive, in the same way that a carbon full suss is 😯

could you explain any +’s and -‘s of that product against mjbs suggestion please mate? this one.

not techy enough to pick the bones myself

mjbs would probably be more suited to using next to your tv/dvd player etc running a media center like xbmc as it is smaller and possibly quiter (though not heard one) the cons would be its less upgradable, no cd drive/less memory and no space for additional drives etc

the hp microserver has the capacity for a bluray drive 8gb ram and 4 or 5 fast 3.5inch sata drives, i have a couple of terabytes in mine. loads of usb slots, hp decent reputation for servers behind it, decent linux support

pcie expansion card etc, you could out in a gfx card with sound and hdmi connectivity for instance.

a killer setup would be the revo running a ssd drive and a media center conected to the tv, with the hp microserver as a nas serving terabytes of media hiden away in a cupboard.

but thats all rather a lot of effort to get setup 🙂 but would be good

stilltortoise – Member

Laptop – jack of all trades
CD player – designed to play CDs

A CD player consists of a transport that reads the CD and a DAC that converts the 1s and 0s. Both elements can make a difference and I suspect both elements will be considerably better in your CD player than your laptop.

If the difference in quality is unbearable, you’ve answered the question of whether quality is important or not. For many the convenience of these systems outweighs the lesser quality.

Agreed: laptop DACs are nowt special, because they’re not designed to be owt special. The Squeezebox Touch/ Duet is definitely worth the cash/ effort in this case, as they have a digital out to plug into your hifi DAC, plus they can play FLAC for CD-quality sound. And the interface isn’t bad either, as these things go; certainly when I look at the Naim or Arcam alternatives I wonder how you’re supposed to trawl through 16,000 tracks on them…

My verdict on sonos is a quality piece of kit, running 3 zones connected to a NAS and running napster and spotify, no shortage of music ever. Had sonos for 5 years now and never failed. Made a long hard choice before i purchased then as i had £3k worth of hifi set up. Never regretted it once.

if you use dlna for instance you bypass the laptop dac/soundcard completely. in fact my hp server has no soundcard or dac it serves files through serviio which transcodes flac to lpcm/wav (completely lossless) straight into the the sony dac and then into the tv via hdmi or amp via optical cable.

you cant tell the difference from flac playing on the sony to a cd.

certainly when I look at the Naim or Arcam alternatives I wonder how you’re supposed to trawl through 16,000 tracks on them…

It’s a flash front end, so it’s available as a web page on any device on your home network. There’s an iphone/ipad app as well. Can’t speak for the Arcam, but I imagine it’s much the same.

The Squeezebox Touch/ Duet is definitely worth the cash/ effort in this case, as they have a digital out to plug into your hifi DAC,

er……id need a separate dac with the squeezebox??? thought it was just squeeze to amp to speakers.

a killer setup would be the revo running a ssd drive and a media center conected to the tv, with the hp microserver as a nas serving terabytes of media hiden away in a cupboard.

could you put a rough price to that set up mate?

if you use dlna for instance you bypass the laptop dac/soundcard completely. in fact my hp server has no soundcard or dac it serves files through serviio which transcodes flac to lpcm/wav (completely lossless) straight into the the sony dac and then into the tv via hdmi or amp via optical cable.

forgive my ignorance on this, but am i right then in thinking your set up is a server with a big hard drive holding your files, going to a dac, then onto tv OR amp, not tv THEN on to amp? all through dlna?
and if im right in thinking you maybe bypass the tv, wheres your interface?
also you say you chnge flac to wav? lossless to lossless? why not just have one type of lossless file in the first place?

thanks

Squeezebox Touch are £134.99 on Amazon at the moment!

clicky

be quick though as they seem to be varying the price quite frequently at the moment.

i started thinking i was forgetting my original focus for a while, which was simply ripping cds to flac, and streaming them to my hifi. now ive got all these possibilities for video too using a ‘media centre’, im not sure which way to go

This is the key bit but it’s important to understand what is possible and how things work to make sure you make the best choice for you.

As mentioned before think of the DAC as as a CD player without the reader. They come in all shapes and sizes, some people are happy with the cheep portable one, others want to spend a couple of pounds on a combined stereo system and some people want to spend hundreds on a separate system. DACs are no different, you’ve tried the bottom of the range one in your PC, the Touch will have a much better one inside it but only you’ll be able to say whether it’s good enough for you, above that all the hifi manufacturers now sell standalone DACS some with more functions than others.

For example the Cambridge Audio DACMagic gets good reviews, NAD make a wireless one and if you have a spare £15,500 …

Your system will have 5 basic parts.
Storage – NAS, server or maybe integrated as part of a player. One advantage of having this remote is that it usually requires fans etc. to keep cool so wont be silent.
Front End – Something to give you access to your music files and enable you to decide which ones to send to the DAC. This maybe be a separate PC or integrated with the storage or DAC (or both). Either way you’ll need some form of interface like a screen, TV, remote.
DAC – Just the one! The bit that converts the digital files into analogue for your speakers.
Amplifier
Speakers

The last three bits all affect the quality of what you hear.

Ho hum – Member
Squeezebox Touch are £134.99 on Amazon at the moment!

clicky

be quick though as they seem to be varying the price quite frequently at the moment.

Ooooh, that might just sway things!

The touch also has a digital output i believe, although you should check this (i.e. it doesn’t process the FLAC file, just passes it straight through bypassing the DAC) so if you found the quality wasn’t good enough you could add a standalone hifi DAC and just use the Touch as the Front End part of the system to choose what to play.

The Amazon reduced price is still there at the moment, but from the threads I have read about it they only seem to put it down at this much reduced price for a few hours and then put it back up again.

However, they have done this 3 or 4 times in the last fortnight, so hold on if you are not lucky now.

Squeezebox Touch are £134.99 on Amazon at the moment!

clicky

be quick though as they seem to be varying the price quite frequently at the moment.
yup, thats swayed it 🙂
i could fanny about on here forever asking loooooads of questions and spending my life umming and ahhing. so that price seems a steal. im gonna take a gamble on it and hopefully i wont be able to tell the difference between the flac files its playing, and the cd they were ripped from 🙂

im still gonna watch this thread and keep asking stuff tho, cos its not over yet! 😀 i want to understand more about how it all works.

ho hum, thanks a lot for that amazon find!

You’re welcome mate 🙂

I would use a decent piece of S/W like Exact Audio Copy as mentioned above to do all your ripping.

Just found this thread and the post lower down does seem to confirm that if you do end up wanting to improve the sound quality you can add the Linn Klimax after all 🙂

cynic-al – Member
And if I can ask another Q of the experts on this….I’ve recently gone the squeezebox route, and also plugged my old Dell desktop into my telly (for VOD) but it’s moisey as ****. It also hosts my external 1TB HDD with my lossless music on. I guess I can put some acoustic deadening around it but is there a better way of getting it quiet for “serious listening sessions” other than replacing with a media centre thingy like that ebuyer one? (presumably these are quieter?)

You need to be careful with sound deadening that you don’t interrupt the air flow and cause things to overheat. There’s quite a few upgrades around these days such as quiet fans, fanless cases, sound absorbing material for inside the panels. Never tried any of it though so can’t recommend anything. It might be worth checking out one of the quiet PC forums.

I don’t how quiet that Revo is but it won’t be silent with a fan and HDD. There are quite a few silent PCs around these days. For not much more than the Revo you could get one of these[/url] and fit a small SSD.

mjb that shuttle looks like exactly what i need, i could probably hide it behind the tv stand and missus wont even see/hear it and can can access all media on the nas via a remote sweet.
factor in ssd and ram though and it starts to get a bit more expensive though.

forgive my ignorance on this, but am i right then in thinking your set up is a server with a big hard drive holding your files, going to a dac, then onto tv OR amp, not tv THEN on to amp? all through dlna?

roughly yes.

router–>EOP adapter–>access point–>NAS
NAS–>sony bdps370–>AMP–>TV & speakers
the sony plugs into the tv and speakers so i can play any media through just the TV or if i want better sound through the amp and main speakers for superior sound.

and if im right in thinking you maybe bypass the tv, wheres your interface?

i dont bypass the tv, i need it to navigate files

also you say you chnge flac to wav? lossless to lossless? why not just have one type of lossless file in the first place?

flac is lossless and non propriety and widely supported though my sony doesnt actually support flac! funny that sony is shit like that is sonys way or the highway.
anyway it supports LPCM just fine which is lossless, so serviio just converts it to that losslessly with no loss in quality to play on the tv or amp

you cant tell the difference between the flac–>lpcm or a cd even mid bitrate mp3 sound very good.

flac is smaller and supports tags so thats why i use that than just wav/lpcm
i have loads of movies/mtb and music favorites as well as music and also access all my holiday photos through the nas too.
media my thing not just music

…or spend your money on some new CDs 😀