I have just joined. Previously I looked in from time to time but already I am glad I did.

Both Graham and John have made me feel welcome already. And I can tell that I will be made welcome even when I ask obvious stuff.

I'm hoping to make changes to my systems which is always stressful. The first is to upgrade the solo and Graham has already given me his advice, which seems very straightforward. Once Christmas is over and the postman has had a rest.

But then I will be looking to do much more with the hard drive of vinyl rips I have gathered. 

I am a big fan of vinyl. But I am still learning about what I can mention on your site (other brands and things) so I will tread carefully before I leap.

Looking forward to learning lots and taking part where I can.

(Hoping this doesn't turn up in the wrong section of the forum)

Peter

Thank you.

I understand that, I would not be looking to endorse anything in particular just pick up thoughts and what people find works.  

The things that particularly interest me are the best ways to avoid the (in my opinion) harsh sound of some digital which is just as annoying as the bad quality of some vinyl which drove me to CDs. But having latterly moved back to vinyl I realise how nasty some CDs are and how bad they sound. I am also finding vinyl is not universally wonderful with quite a few recent purchases being disappointing. 

I have some lovely vinyl (with a rejuvenated linn turntable) and some lovely vinyl rips on my Mac desktop prepared by friends and myself (but in a different room). And am trying to decide on the best way to enjoy them without turning my hifi into my computer and vice versa. I am not sure I buy into streaming, I tried it and wasn't totally convinced but I am in no hurry and it is getting better. I have burned lots of the vinyl rips into DVD audio discs which work very well (using a Marantz bluray/sacd/dvd-a player). They sound much better than any digital downloads, SACDs etc...to me.

The thing I look for most is how the sound makes me feel. Analogue seems to make me happier, my feet tap and I smile. 

But I am waffling.

Thank you for the welcome

Yes very friendly. Thank you. 

If you have a hard drive full of vinyl rips you could do a lot worse than connect it to a little Raspberry Pi mini-computer. A few of us use it for streaming, but you can plug in a USB drive too. The big advantage of trying this is its cost - or lack of it! "Cheap-as-chips" comes to mind!

http://audio-forum.gspaudio.co.uk/raspberry-pi-streaming_topic2344.html - Have a look here.

I can certainly recommend the Majestic for digital sources. It is superb! It produces a valve like, analogue sound with bags of detail and musicality. I was so impressed I bought two. One for the bedroom (for use with Grado PS 1000 headphones and the Solo ULDE) and one for the lounge with a Squeezebox touch streaming music  to the Majestic from an Apple Mac, a pair of Proprius monobloc amplifiers and a pair of PMC Touch 8 speakers. Both systems, especially the one in the lounge, sound fantastic. With both systems I use GSP interconnects and speaker cables.

The local PMC speaker representative has told me that my system sounds better than the demonstration rig that they use for hi-fi shows (costing in excess of £15,000! It's certainly the best hi-fi system I have heard. If you have any doubts about what I'm saying try borrowing a Majestic (and other items) from the loans scheme.

I didn't try the touch through a dac. As I didn't have one at the time. I also didn't have ethernet to the hifi (I fixed that recently too). So maybe a retry of streaming would be in order. 

I do have a nice dac now, not the majestic. Graham wasn't making one at the time I checked. 

I read through a huge discussion before he did (admittedly a while ago) whilst I was trying to make the squeezebox (since gifted to my son) work nicely. That discussion I presume became the first dac. 

Things move on very quickly.