New Frontiers in Mixing
Feb. 19th, 2007 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
billroperI just spent an hour and a half beating up New Frontier. With luck, the next song won't take anywhere near that long to fix up.
It strikes me that it would be really convenient to have small computers with wireless cards sitting turned on and connected to the other stereos in the house so that I could just copy a file there to listen to instead of having to burn CDs. Of course, I have no small unused computers sitting around. I do have a couple of big, hulking ones.
I suspect this is not going to be a popular suggestion. :)
It strikes me that it would be really convenient to have small computers with wireless cards sitting turned on and connected to the other stereos in the house so that I could just copy a file there to listen to instead of having to burn CDs. Of course, I have no small unused computers sitting around. I do have a couple of big, hulking ones.
I suspect this is not going to be a popular suggestion. :)
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 12:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 04:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 02:52 pm (UTC)Buy a spare RCA to 3.5mm lead and leave that permanently connected to the hifi, then it's quick to connect up the MP3 player (the USB end of things might take a little longer but again, have a USB hub with easy to reach ports (I use the Belkin 7 port hub which has two sockets on top for memory keys etc.))
And I bought a cheap iPod dock for my hifi in the living room (£15 including power supply to recharge the iPod and an infrared remote) so I can just drop the iPod into the cradle and play stuff from there through the hifi should I so desire ... I will be upgrading to a video cradle sometime since the hifi is the home cinema system, but as I have no video worth mentioning (just news podcasts) on the iPod yet, it can wait.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 12:23 am (UTC)What you want to do...
... is to have ONE good set of active nearfield monitor speakers and ONE good set of headphones. The headphones help you find any nasty glitches in the audio, and then the monitor speakers help you position your sounds properly.
The difficulty of using CD players, radios, MP3 players, regular computer speakers, etc., etc., etc., is that they are designed for hi-fi sound reproduction; their purpose is to make the sound, sound better. Monitor speakers give you the sound as it is. Get a good mix on those, and you'll have a good mix.
I finally got some monitor speakers for myself for Christmas, and the difference in sound from the 5.1 multimedia speakers I had been mixing with, and from every other set of speakers I've ever owned, is astounding. If you have got monitor speakers, and you don't feel you can trust the sound from them, then you've got the wrong speakers, or at least the wrong placement.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 04:20 am (UTC)But in the current case, I simply wanted to let
no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 02:48 pm (UTC)The MP101 is an 802.11b (or wired ethernet, your choice!) MP3 and WMA player. You hook it up with a pair of RCAs to the back of the hifi, connect it to your wireless network (or plug in an ethernet cable) and you can then play music from your PC through the hifi. It comes with a remote and the display shows you what track you're playing or allows you to choose what to listen to (including some internet radio!)
And on US ebay.com, they are selling brand new in box for $40, or second hand for around $25.
The only downsides as far as I am concerned are:
1) I believe you have to have their music player running on your PC
2) it's only 802.11b
3) it doesn't stream video (other devices do, but they are more expensive and I already own this one)
4) it only supports WEP, not WPA2, which means if you go wireless, then the rest of your network becomes a little more vulnerable (unless you can do MAC address blocking and only allow that particular player to connect via WEP but require everything else to have higher security)
5) their software becomes a little flaky if you have more than 20k tracks indexed (I have far more than that!)
If you want to check on less advanced speakers, have you ever tried hooking up to the TV line input and seeing what it sounds like on TV speakers? :-)