This is for a home stereo system that has worked well for more than 10 years. Sony 400 disc megastorage jukebox going into a middle-of-the-road NAD 340 amplifier to my Cambridge Soundworks speakers with sub-woofer.
The Sony player is on death's doorstep. The carousel spins around and around without finding the proper CD and has to be turned off and on to get it to work properly.
Sony no longer makes a 400 CD unit.
My music-loving friends tell me i should convert to a hard drive as my music centre. I should rip all my CDs as 320 bit rate MP3s and play everything back from a hard drive. They suggest a low-cost laptop for this. But my question is what quality of sound will that give me? CD players prices vary widely and my understanding is that the quality of the digital to analog conversion is critical to the final quality of the sound. But how does one judge the digital to analog quality of different laptops?
Are there other setups that would give me the flexibility of the hard drive but maintain the decent quality to which I am accustomed?
Many thanks in advance.
The Sony player is on death's doorstep. The carousel spins around and around without finding the proper CD and has to be turned off and on to get it to work properly.
Sony no longer makes a 400 CD unit.
My music-loving friends tell me i should convert to a hard drive as my music centre. I should rip all my CDs as 320 bit rate MP3s and play everything back from a hard drive. They suggest a low-cost laptop for this. But my question is what quality of sound will that give me? CD players prices vary widely and my understanding is that the quality of the digital to analog conversion is critical to the final quality of the sound. But how does one judge the digital to analog quality of different laptops?
Are there other setups that would give me the flexibility of the hard drive but maintain the decent quality to which I am accustomed?
Many thanks in advance.