Dec 29 2006

My spe­ci­fi­ca­tions for the per­fect ste­reo have not nearly been matched by any com­pany. Just buying one with blue­tooth and USB plug and play will set me back £280. Thus I have set a task for myself: to build my own. This may take 5 years going by my track record but I see it as a fea­si­ble effort. So, what are my aims for this ulti­mate ste­reo system? 

At the moment I use my PC for all of my music, whether it be lis­te­ning to last​.fm sta­tions or mp3s via the highly fle­xi­ble and bri­lliant foobar2000. I don’t like having to have my pc on to lis­ten to music, espe­cially as it has a ten­dency to make fan noise, con­sume power and all the other fai­lings of my four year old PC (which is stan­ding up remar­kably well). 

Func­tions I want: 

  • Wire­less con­nec­ti­vity to play inter­net, last​.fm sta­tions and send play­back sta­tis­tics to the last​.fm service.
  • Wire­less or blue­tooth con­nec­ti­vity to quickly sync’ newly down­loa­ded files from PC to the stereo’s harddrive. 
  • USB Plug and play for mp3 pla­yers, etc, built in ipod dock
  • Blue­tooth con­nec­ti­vity to trans­fer files to my phone and other devices
  • DAB Digi­tal Radio Tuner, Short range FM output
  • DVD-Audio, MP3-CD, CD play­back and DVD/CD bur­ning capa­bi­li­ties (pre­fe­rably tray-less for sexiness).
  • MP3, FLAC, WAV, OGG, M4A, AC3, WMA, etc.
  • A blue­tooth remote (pos­sibly using Wii controller)
  • Tape deck (yeah I still love that ana­lo­gue fix)
  • Recor­ding functions
  • LCD colour dis­play that shows album art, artist image, now pla­ying infor­ma­tion and play­list info — essen­tially what my foo­bar shows (that’s the costly bit and touch screen is only a dream), spec­trum analyser. 
  • 5.1 surround sound com­pa­ti­bi­lity, Bass and Tre­ble control
  • 100 GB HDD inter­nal and sup­port for exter­nal HDDs
  • Phono and digi­tal audio, headphone jack and mic­rophone plugs
  • Ideally all run­ning using Foobar2000, but that needs win­dows et al. 

I have a mul­ti­tude of spea­kers ready for use, so the sys­tem will be desig­ned to work around them.

I am not asking much of myself.

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