Optimizing My Home Entertainment Center

Excit­ing, I know, but I’ve real­ly reached a cross­roads with my cur­rent set­up. See, I’m old enough to remem­ber when music crit­ics like Yancey and Sasha suf­fered some pret­ty amaz­ing hard dri­ve crash­es in the last decade. They spent time rip­ping their discs to hard dri­ves, only to watch their col­lec­tions van­ish, thanks to hard­ware fail­ures. It was­n’t pretty.

So I wait­ed. I bid­ed my time hop­ing that some­day I would feel con­fi­dent enough in tech­nol­o­gy to make the leap. Fact of the mat­ter is, I’m still not con­fi­dent, but my mod­est rowhome won’t real­ly acco­mo­date stuff like cd col­lec­tions these days. Add a kid to the mix and you’re sud­den­ly not as con­cerned about the black met­al col­lec­tion you’ve com­piled that you hard­ly ever have time (or patience) to lis­ten to. Thus…

I’m in the process of rethink­ing the liv­ing room. What if I move the stereo receiv­er into the TV stand and run every­thing through that, final­ly putting the fan­cy speak­ers I bought near­ly a decade ago to good use? If I hang the TV on the wall I can put the turntable atop the stand above the cub­by that hous­es the receiv­er, with the set top box and Xbox 360 occu­py­ing the oth­er two cubbies.

Which rais­es anoth­er ques­tion: do I upgrade the receiv­er I bought back in grad school to some­thing that has an mp3 input jack? I fore­see a time in the near future where I’ve ripped every­thing to the 2 ter­abyte hard dri­ve I bought at the Port Rich­mond Tar­get on Black Fri­day and I’ll want to stream from it through iTunes (this is pos­si­ble, yes?) and it might make sense to be able to just plug my Mac­book into the receiv­er direct­ly, allow­ing me to con­trol it with the remote app on my iPhone. The future!

Is this where I say I think I already need to upgrade my wire­less router?

 

 

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