Cobble together a music system
Cobble together a music system
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Discussion

blugnu

Original Poster:

1,523 posts

264 months

Tuesday 9th April 2013
quotequote all
I used to be quite in to hi-fi, but with one thing and another I haven't had any set up for ages. In fact I sold my Mordaunt-Short floor standing speakers some time ago as I no longer had room for them. Then on Sunday I picked up a pair of Mission 760 speakers (I think - Mission bookshelf speakers, anyway) at a car boot sale for less than £20, and I got to thinking I should get everything out again.

Somewhere I have the following:

Hardware
Arcam A75 amp
Arcam CD62 CD player
Mission Cyrus One (faulty but probably repairable - keeps blowing a fuse, but I now know someone who fixes things like that for beer. I've only heard the Cyrus One for about 10 minutes in total, and loved it until the fuse blew. I found it in a skip so it doesn't owe me anything, but I'd love to resurrect it)
An iPod 60GB 'Classic' with a faulty harddrive - thinking of making it run Rockbox so it will play FLAC files.
Mission 760i speakers
An Ion USB turntable
Pure Evoke DAB radio
A laptop running Ubuntu Linux, with a Realtek ALC270 sound card
A 500GB hard drive
A router
Possibly, somewhere, a Buffalo Linkstation (NAS)
An iPhone 1 and dock with line out

Software
Lots of CDs
Lots of MP3s on the external hard drive
Lots of FLACs on the laptop
Lots of vinyl

What I'd like to achieve
Something nice to listen to music one while I work on my laptop.

I think this means one of the amps (Mission for form factor, Arcam for actually working and having remote control) connected to all the sources, which is simple enough I suppose.

What I'd really like though is a wireless connection between the laptop and the amp so I can listen to the music from the laptop on proper speakers through a proper amp. I think then with the NAS I could the store and access everything via the laptop. What I'd also like to do is to use the old iPhone to control the NAS with something like nasTunes. This would appeal as it would mean I wouldn't have to have my laptop out to listen to music, and also because it re-uses otherwise redundant items. (You can perhaps get from the source of the Mission kit that I don't like waste)

Does this sound plausible? I think I'd have to do something with the iPhone to get it to play the FLAc files, but then I'm not sure that nasTunes would work. Any advice on the best way to set this all up so that I can select and play the files on the NAS (a mix flac, apple lossless, mp3) without having to use the laptop would be much appreciated. Or any other comments and tips - last time I had a system set up I'd never even seen an iPod!