Hi, I'm a newbie from Melbourne, Aust. with a tech question. I've already posted this on the Introductions forum and have been told to repost it here.
I don't have any tech background or training. Listening to music is one of the joys in my life and I'm not necessarily into HI FI tech stuff but if need be then I'm happy to go there.
I got this idea that it would be cool to rip all our CD's to Itunes and play them through my 20 year old stereo system. Providing quality wasn't TOO compromised...
So what I did was I put about 30GB of Itunes music on a 750GB external hard drive and connected that to a Toshiba Satellite P3 laptop with a USB lead (unfortunately the laptop USB ports are the older slower type, USB 1.0). I then connected the laptop to the AUX red/white pots on the stereo amp (Pioneer 400W SA 606, it’s old but still pumping out CD sourced music very nicely, both channels quite clean) with RCA leads from the laptop’s headphone jack, which happens to be right along side the USB ports on the back panel of the laptop and when the 3.5mm headphone plug with built in splitter to stereo RCA pots is plugged in it presses against the body of the USB plugs (one for external HD and one for the mouse). Whether this is causing a minor EMF interference to the sound signal travelling through headphone jack I don’t know, but they can’t be prevented from touching each other.
The best sound I can get from this hook up, has good power ouput but a lot of fuzz across the dynamic range (bass, mid and high), most noticeable of course when music with lots of fuzzy guitar is played. I have tried the other inputs on the amp (tape & phono) and they are no good. Admittedly running Itunes on the laptop and accessing the files on the external HD makes command response times a bit slow but I don’t think that that would cause the signal to deteriorate so noticeably. I plugged some headphones into the jack to check the sound through them and it was fine. So it sounds like a an impedance mismatch from the laptop to the amp.
I don’t think it’s related to the problem but I setup up the laptop’s screensaver to scroll through 20GB of digital photos while the music is playing (so it doubles as a digital photoframe) the photos are also accessed on the external HD via the somewhat slow USB connection.
Are there any external sound cards available that could match up the impedance and clean up the signal? Or is this whole set up just not going to work? I know of people who have successfully setup itunes on their stereos using Ipods, I don’t want to do it that way because I like the idea of building lots of playlists from our entire music collection and selecting from a large screen as the mood fits. I know that MP3 files will never sound as good as CD sourced signals but I figured it wouldn't be TOO noticable...
Would a new 5.1 home theatre system have better impedance matching and so work better for this sort of setup? I have’nt got one so far because I like my old separate component stereo system but the CD player is starting to skip the 1st track on CD’s and despite running those clean up discs with the little brushes on them it still does it. I tried the new setup because I figured the CD player is on it’s way out.
That’s about it for the details. I though I had come up with a good idea with this setup but maybe it’s just a fanciful idea that can’t work.
Thanks for listening to my issue
I don't have any tech background or training. Listening to music is one of the joys in my life and I'm not necessarily into HI FI tech stuff but if need be then I'm happy to go there.
I got this idea that it would be cool to rip all our CD's to Itunes and play them through my 20 year old stereo system. Providing quality wasn't TOO compromised...
So what I did was I put about 30GB of Itunes music on a 750GB external hard drive and connected that to a Toshiba Satellite P3 laptop with a USB lead (unfortunately the laptop USB ports are the older slower type, USB 1.0). I then connected the laptop to the AUX red/white pots on the stereo amp (Pioneer 400W SA 606, it’s old but still pumping out CD sourced music very nicely, both channels quite clean) with RCA leads from the laptop’s headphone jack, which happens to be right along side the USB ports on the back panel of the laptop and when the 3.5mm headphone plug with built in splitter to stereo RCA pots is plugged in it presses against the body of the USB plugs (one for external HD and one for the mouse). Whether this is causing a minor EMF interference to the sound signal travelling through headphone jack I don’t know, but they can’t be prevented from touching each other.
The best sound I can get from this hook up, has good power ouput but a lot of fuzz across the dynamic range (bass, mid and high), most noticeable of course when music with lots of fuzzy guitar is played. I have tried the other inputs on the amp (tape & phono) and they are no good. Admittedly running Itunes on the laptop and accessing the files on the external HD makes command response times a bit slow but I don’t think that that would cause the signal to deteriorate so noticeably. I plugged some headphones into the jack to check the sound through them and it was fine. So it sounds like a an impedance mismatch from the laptop to the amp.
I don’t think it’s related to the problem but I setup up the laptop’s screensaver to scroll through 20GB of digital photos while the music is playing (so it doubles as a digital photoframe) the photos are also accessed on the external HD via the somewhat slow USB connection.
Are there any external sound cards available that could match up the impedance and clean up the signal? Or is this whole set up just not going to work? I know of people who have successfully setup itunes on their stereos using Ipods, I don’t want to do it that way because I like the idea of building lots of playlists from our entire music collection and selecting from a large screen as the mood fits. I know that MP3 files will never sound as good as CD sourced signals but I figured it wouldn't be TOO noticable...
Would a new 5.1 home theatre system have better impedance matching and so work better for this sort of setup? I have’nt got one so far because I like my old separate component stereo system but the CD player is starting to skip the 1st track on CD’s and despite running those clean up discs with the little brushes on them it still does it. I tried the new setup because I figured the CD player is on it’s way out.
That’s about it for the details. I though I had come up with a good idea with this setup but maybe it’s just a fanciful idea that can’t work.
Thanks for listening to my issue
but now a serious setup has been installed.
