Kniferide wrote: Thu Feb 01, 2024 10:30 am Right now I have a $20 Logitech Bluetooth receiver plugged directly into a pair of Fluid FX80's that I wasn't using. If I want to listen to records, i plug in my $15 RIAA preamp instead. I have a little line selector somewhere but I don't want to look for it. I'm getting less and less fancy with this stuff as I get older. I have 3 vintage receivers and a ton of old hifi speakers sitting around that all need something fixed in them and I just can't make myself care enough to do it anymore. Shit I'm on now sounds fine and takes up very little precious space.

I had some vintage amps and speakers I was lugging around with me for years every time I'd move. I was gonna fix them one day! That day never came. Honestly, looking back, vintage stereo equipment is outdated in the worst way. Unless you only ever listen to records or the radio, it is not worth using old gear. Having to deal with dongles and adapters just to make them work in the modern world is just a hassle at this point and you miss out on some useful features.

cakes wrote: Thu Feb 01, 2024 10:35 am

Kniferide wrote: Thu Feb 01, 2024 10:30 am Right now I have a $20 Logitech Bluetooth receiver plugged directly into a pair of Fluid FX80's that I wasn't using. If I want to listen to records, i plug in my $15 RIAA preamp instead. I have a little line selector somewhere but I don't want to look for it. I'm getting less and less fancy with this stuff as I get older. I have 3 vintage receivers and a ton of old hifi speakers sitting around that all need something fixed in them and I just can't make myself care enough to do it anymore. Shit I'm on now sounds fine and takes up very little precious space.

I had some vintage amps and speakers I was lugging around with me for years every time I'd move. I was gonna fix them one day! That day never came. Honestly, looking back, vintage stereo equipment is outdated in the worst way. Unless you only ever listen to records or the radio, it is not worth using old gear. Having to deal with dongles and adapters just to make them work in the modern world is just a hassle at this point.

The pile of half working horseshit in my basement is getting so out of control. I'm not even sure what all is down there anymore. The only thing I'm remotely interested in keeping is my Sansui 5000X, but I haven had a decent set of working passive speakers in forever so I have nothing to plug into it other than a pair of NS10t's that I definitely do not like to hear. I should just Craigslist the hole pile. Most of the time if I'm listening to music off my computer its via my studio monitors but for living room tunes, I just can't be picky about the setup, i'm doing dishes and shit, playing Yhatzee... anything is fine. Hell, I have a cheapo bluetooth speaker that floats around the house that gets as much play as anything else.

I've probably posted this before but the digital setup here is the Mac Mini with optical out to a Vincent DAC going into the Marantz. Bought everything used. Haven't changed it except to upgrade the Mini, been using it since I laboriously ripped my CD collection to lossless a decade ago. The Airport Express is there to allow AirPlay lossless streaming from phones etc. The Mini is controlled from the iOS iTunes Remote app or screen sharing via VNC as needed. Not seen: 2TB external drive to hold the music. The speakers are DIY kits, Australian maker VAF, I built in the mid 90s.
Last time I used the CD player I had to tap it on the top to unstick the tracking servo, it goes years between plays.

I've been happy with one of these I found on scratch and dent sale plus some passive speakers:
https://www.crutchfield.com/p_813PNEDGE ... 7&tp=63339

It's got BluOS https://bluos.io/ built in , which allows for all of the streaming services and internet radio you might want, and also indexes music files nicely. I think the app is very good too, One of the features that sets it apart from a similar offering from Sonos is that you can plug a usb drive directly into the machine vs having a network drive or NAS, which can be annoying if you don't enjoy solving IT problems.

Bumpin.

I am about to move into a slightly larger place with a goofball little half closet. Enough space to stuff a server into.

I'm considering ditching my streaming services and taking my data to a private server. Maybe 8-10 tb if I can swing it. Movies and music, possibly my trove (not that trove) of ttrpg books.

I would have no idea where to begin. Grab a used tower off Craigslist, stuff it with hard drives, and set up a cloud thingy?

Buy a NAS box from Newegg and watch YouTube?

What would be the next step in this process beyond "what do I want out of this thing?"

GuyLaCroix wrote: Mon Mar 03, 2025 4:49 pm Bumpin.

I am about to move into a slightly larger place with a goofball little half closet. Enough space to stuff a server into.

I'm considering ditching my streaming services and taking my data to a private server. Maybe 8-10 tb if I can swing it. Movies and music, possibly my trove (not that trove) of ttrpg books.

I would have no idea where to begin. Grab a used tower off Craigslist, stuff it with hard drives, and set up a cloud thingy?

Buy a NAS box from Newegg and watch YouTube?

What would be the next step in this process beyond "what do I want out of this thing?"

How tech savvy are you?

One possibility it to look into Synology's DS+ line of what they call "towers". They make dedicated NAS boxes that you load with hard drives, then can admin from a nice GUI interface. You can run all sorts of software, even set up a web server or home surveillance system if you wanted to, too.

https://www.synology.com/

The Synology NAS are nice. The QNAP ones are almost as nice. To be honest, tho, we've done okay with our 4000-album music collection for about ten years with Plex Media Server running on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 1TB USB disk hanging off the USB port.

PMS is great and the companion apps really work, but you might want to instruct it to only use the metadata on your files if you object (I do) to it fetching reviews from AllMusic and related sources to explain your record collection to you.

On the NAS thing it can be tempting to overthink the RAID config and space requirements. I sweated a lot of details unnecessarily when I configured the one that's still on the shelf waiting for me to finish fixing the fucking tags and album art (Mp3Tag is the business for this job, super easy to use)

One last detail: Plex volunteers to help you poke a hole in your Internet firewall so you can stream stuff from home while you're away. This works great, but you ought to think seriously about storing personal data (non-media) on any machine set up like that. Sooner or later someone's going to take an interest in trying to exploit it.

I also use plex with a similar set up, though I have a full media server and just one big ass HDD. From there I can stream ethernet locally to sonos, or I can play direct to an amp I (sometimes) have hooked directly to the server.

Thanks for patience, all. I'm just now sitting down to reply after scribbling the things I feel like I want and the things I should probably take into consideration -

Here is what I would like - about 5 terabytes with a redundancy drive if possible.
Access for maximum of 5 people.
Streaming capability would be nice, but I'm happy to be able to download the files over a stable connection.

Things to consider -
I live on a college campus as part of my partner's work compensation. The network I would be using is accessible to the kids. I am purchasing a VPN subscription in anticipation of our relocation to another part of the school. Could I integrate that into the box?

I am not super tech savvy, let's be real.

Finally, a local put this up :

https://portland.craigslist.org/mlt/ele ... 53209.html

Should I swing for it? Seems like a decent deal.

I’d do it. Synology checks all the boxes and that’s a good deal.