How to Play 2000 CDs Without a CD Player
The Christmas Present
I remember celebrating Christmas back in 1983 or 1984. My girlfriend (and today my wife) had me open up a present, and it was a CD of Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town. I love Bruce Springsteen, but I was confused as I didn’t own a CD player. Then I opened up the larger present — it was a Yamaha CD-X1 CD player. To this day, I think that’s the best Christmas present I’ve ever received.
I plugged the CD player into my stereo, put in the Springsteen CD, and that was the end of vinyl for me. I didn’t miss taking out the brush to clean a record before playing it, and really didn’t miss the idea that every time I played a record it had lost a small bit of audio quality.
The earlier Yamaha CD-1 had a list price of $1600, so the CD-X1, which was around $400, was one of the first affordable CD players to hit the market, and for many audio enthusiasts was their first CD player.
Unfortunately I sold my entire vinyl record collection as I started to build up my CD library. I’m sure some of those records would be worth a lot today! As I passed the 1000 CD mark my beloved Yamaha player died — I think the laser gave out. Time for a replacement!
Arcam Alpha 9
By this time I had upgraded my stereo hardware with a Bryston pre-amp and amp, along with B&W 803 speakers. I thought I’d pick a CD player that was comparable in quality and chose an Arcam Alpha 9. The Brits do a few things really well, and high quality audio gear is one of them. As I was passing the 2000 CD mark the Arcam also started to have problems.
Squeezebox Touch
My friend and lifelong audiophile Brian suggested I take a look at the new Logitech Squeezebox Touch as a possible replacement for my Arcam. This device looked really interesting. It was a small device with a color touchscreen display and remote control. The Touch had a high quality built-in Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) that many thought was superior to mid to high range CD players at the time. And it only costs $299.
While the Touch had a slot for a Compact Flash card, it was designed to stream music from your computer. After getting the Touch on your network (via its built-in Wi-Fi interface in my case), you would install the Logitech Media Server software on your computer. The LMS would then scan your music library, and you could then stream any music on your computer to the Touch over your home network.
While CD’s were a huge improvement in convenience over LP’s, the Touch took it a step further. No CD to find, get out of the jewel case and put into a slot an hit play. Better yet, the sound of the Touch was fantastic, and it quickly developed a huge cult following in the audio world. The Touch also had apps for Spotify, DI.FM, TuneIn and Pandora. It did a lot more than any CD player.
Ripping 2000 CD’s
There was only one problem at this point. I had 2000 CD’s and needed to rip each one to my computer so I could play them using the Touch. As an iTunes user I just used the iTunes app to rip each and every CD.
When you import a CD into iTunes you have the option of a variety of formats to rip the CD to. I chose Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC). The keyword is lossless. An ALAC track is about half the size of an AIFF or WAV track, but when it is played back you get a bit perfect stream of the original CD. In the past there have been some audiophiles that claimed they could hear a difference between an ALAC-encoded track and a WAV or AIFF version, but I chalk that up to paranoid delusions that many in the audiophile world seem to have on a regular basis.
If you do choose to rip your CD’s into iTunes make sure to check the box for error correction. That will slow down your import process, but ensure you are getting the right bits off of the CD. There are other specialized apps available on Windows and OS X that claim to do a more accurate job of ripping CD’s than iTunes, but after looking into them I didn’t believe they resulted in a higher quality rip over iTunes with error correction.
If you don’t use iTunes, or for some reason just don’t like working with Apple technology, FLAC is another good compression scheme to archive your CD library. Like ALAC, FLAC is lossless, open source, and pervasive. But iTunes doesn’t support the FLAC format, so if you do use iTunes, ALAC makes a lot more sense.
And of course, after ripping your CD library make sure to have a backup! My iTunes library is over 600GB, which fortunately easily fits on the increasingly affordable 1TB+ external USB disk drives.
HRT MusicStreamer II+
It took a while, but I managed to rip my entire CD library to iTunes in ALAC format, and now could choose any album I owned and play it immediately on my stereo through the Squeezebox Touch. The Squeezebox Touch community was very disappointed to hear in 2012 that Logitech discontinued the Squeezebox Touch with no replacement.
While the quality of the DAC chip and analog output of the Touch was state-of-the-art when it was introduced, there were a lot of advancements in this area after the Touch was taken off the market. My friend Brian replaced his HRT MusicStreamer II+ asynchronous USB DAC with a $6500 Playback Designs MPD-3 and was generous to offer me a loan of his HRT DAC.
The Touch has a USB port, and I read blog postings on how to configure it so I could bypass the built-in DAC and output the digital bit stream to a USB DAC, but never got the configuration fully working. HRT was an early pioneer of asynchronous DACs, which dramatically reduce the issue of jitter by having the on-board clock of the DAC control the USB stream instead of the clock on your computer. Today nearly all USB DACs are asynchronous.
Raspberry Pi
I had read some articles about the $35 Raspberry Pi single board computer being used as a music streaming device, with output to a USB DAC. It seemed that investing $35 to see if I could put together a Squeezebox Touch replacement with better quality audio output would be a worthwhile effort.
I bought a Raspberry Pi B+ kit which included a power adaptor, micro-SD card, WiFi USB dongle, and HDMI cable. Initially I tried out the standard Linux distros that the Raspberry Pi foundation recommends. They worked, and it was pretty cool watching the Pi boot up on a small TV I attached to it via HDMI. But it took a bit of work to get the audio to output to the HRT MusicStreamer II+ instead of the built-in audio output of the Pi.
While I was playing around with different Linux distros I stumbled upon the Volumio project. Volumio is an open source audiophile music player Linux build, led by an Italian guy, Michaelangelo Guarise. It’s designed to do one thing — play music on your single board computer. I flashed a micro-SD card with Volumio, booted up the Pi, and it chose the HRT DAC as the default audio device. Awesome. It took some effort to mount my iTunes and HD music collections as networked SMB drives for Volumio to recognize them, but after that I had remote access to my entire music collection on my iMac. Volumio also supports Spotify (with a premium account) and has an Airplay emulator, so I can beam music from any music app on my iPhone or iPad to it.
Volumio has a browser-based interface that has been tuned to work well on tablets on smartphones. No need for an app although there are options available for Android users.
I finally had my Squeezebox Touch replacement! The sound of the HRT DAC being driven by Volumio and the Raspberry Pi was fantastic. Volumio also supports Web radio. With the Airplay emulator I had more options than the Touch, and better sound. Plus it was a lot of fun putting the whole thing together.
IQAudio Pi-DAC+
One nice thing about using Volumio is they have a thriving online community with their forum. I noticed many users talking about the benefits of I2S DACs. I2S is an electrical serial bus interface for connecting digital audio devices together. In the case of Volumio users, they were buying I2S DACs specially designed for their single-board computers, primarily Raspberry Pi’s.
The two most popular I2S DACs for the Pi are the HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro and IQAudio Pi-DAC+. They both use the same TI Burr Brown PCM5122 chip and cost $45. But it seemed that people thought the IQAudio DAC had slightly better sound, and it also had an amplified headphone jack. On top of that, it looked like IQAudio offered great support for their products, and that’s very important to me. They even had a downloads page with pre-configured SD card images for all of the popular Raspberry Pi audio distros.
The final kicker for me was IQAudio had some really nice looking cases for the combined Pi and DAC card, so I placed my order. $45 for a great sounding DAC, how could I pass this up.
IQAudio is a company based in Glasgow, Scotland. They manufacture their DACs in the U.K. and ship them out of Heathrow to the U.S. A week later I got the Pi-DAC+ in the mail, connected it to my Pi (no soldering needed), booted up Volumio and it immediately recognized the new DAC. I enabled hardware volume control — a feature even many several thousand dollar DACs lack — chose a Mark Knopfler track (had to choose a Glasgow-born musician for the first track on a Glasgow-designed DAC) and hit play on Volumio. Not only did it work out of the box, but the sound was just stunning. It was hard for me to believe that such a small and inexpensive DAC could sound so great. The HRT USB DAC sounded really good, but this was so much better.
I later put together the smoked acrylic case for the Pi/DAC combo, and now have a networked music streamer/DAC that costs less than $150 but probably sounds better than many commercial products costing several thousand dollars.
DIY Versus Commercial
I admit that for someone without a technical background, flashing a micro-SD card with a specialized Linux build and booting up a single-board computer can seem like a daunting task. But it’s really pretty easy, you just need to follow the line by line instructions for any system you choose. And most of these Linux audiophile platforms have very friendly online communities who will be happy to help you. Plus, almost everyone knows some computer geek — just buy them a good bottle of wine and have them do it for you!
While there’s nothing wrong with choosing a commercial networked music streamer/DAC, there are many advantages of the DIY route beyond paying a fraction of the price of a commercial option. I believe the biggest reason to go DIY is the upgrade paths you have. The ecosystem behind single-board computer hardware and audiophile Linux distros continues to advance at a rapid pace, and it’s easy for me to tap into it. Few commercial vendors have an interest in keeping the software of their closed, proprietary boxes up to date — they want you to buy a new box.
Just last month IQAudio released support for Roon. Roon is an extremely sophisticated music player that can control all of the networked music devices in your house. I tried out a free trial and thought it was very impressive, but it’s also $119/year and had a bug that turned the volume of my KEF speakers to 100%. If the price comes down I might try it again. However my point is that the little $45 DAC I purchased from IQAudio now supports Roon — I can go to IQAudio’s site, download a Raspberry Pi image, flash a micro-SD card, and can then control it with Roon. Upgrade cost? $0.
The Raspberry Pi 3 just came out at the same $35 price — at 10x the performance of the original Pi — and it’s compatible with my IQAudio DAC. The Volumio team is close to releasing Volumio 2, which promises to leapfrog the already great capabilities of the current Volumio platform. Just for fun I flashed a spare micro-SD card with piCorePlayer, which runs Squeezelite on a small read-only Linux. I’m once again using my Logitech Music Server, now streaming to the Pi and IQAudio Pi-DAC+ with piCorePlayer. It’s a Squeezebox Touch — without the Touch hardware — controlled through my iPhone.
It’s a great time to be a music lover. And it’s a whole lot of fun to spend less than $150 and have a great sounding CD player replacement that can easily access all 2000 of my CD’s. But I do have to admit, I kind of miss that old Yamaha CD-X1!
