Inspirational Technology

My Music System

While wringing my hands over whether or not to buy a new Powermac I rearranged my apartment to solve the hum problem I was having with the audio out of my Cube. It turns out it was the poor quality cable I was using so I juggled things so that I could use the cables I still have from my old high-end audio system. This meant I switched from using a small Rotel integrated amp to my really old Yamaha MX800 power amp. The Yamaha is something I've been hauling around for about 15 years and was part of my first component stereo system. It's a pretty decent amp though the Linn and Musical Fidelity amps I used in my last system definitely sounded better. Anyway, activating the Yamaha and my old speaker cables also allowed me to activate the other remaining piece of my system that I still have, my Martin Logan Aerius i speakers. It just feels wrong to have these things setup in my crappy apartment and I may put them back in the box because of this, but man I'd forgotton how great these things sound.

This change has also made me completely dependent on the computer for all media since I don't have a preamp to use for switching sources. Surprisingly the CD drive in the Cube doesn't sound all that bad. Of course there's a huge difference between the CD and an MP3 made from the CD. There's simply no depth to MP3s, they don't sound terrible, but for serious listening the experience is definitely lacking. Well given that CDs don't have that great of depth either, maybe the MP3s are terrible, oh well MP3s are about convenience not fidelity.

With my new Powermac I also ordered two 80GB drives that I'm planning to run in a mirror configuration for some redundancy. I've been worrying about how to backup my MP3 collection since I started creating it and mirroring the drives is actually the cheapest way to do it now. My estimate is that it will take a little over 100MB to store my entire CD collection in MP3s so I'll have to add more space later, but it will be a very long time (if ever) before the whole collection is ripped. Of course I've also already downloaded nearly 7.5GB of MP3s from eMusic and that number will continue to grow in the future. Now that I'm actually spending money on MP3s rather then just ripping my CDs the need for some kind of duplication is pretty important. Previously I always had the physical CD for backup, now I'm getting a large amount of stuff that's just gone if the hard drive goes and eMusic were to shutdown. This is a big reason I've always disliked buying stuff that just exists in digital form. Now though, I'm seeing it's a hell of a lot easier to move a harddrive or two then it is to keep hauling around the 20 or so boxes of CDs I have.