My New Toy

My New Toy
Originally uploaded by JadeMonkee.

I bought two Logitech Squeezebox Classics off of Ebay before I left for Sydney last week, and they arrived yesterday.
I'm going to buy a set of powered speakers for one of them, and put it in the bedroom for an alarm/lull machine.
The other one I set up in the loungeroom last night as a replacement for the loud, awkward laptop that I was previously using for my music player.
It's the best thing ever.
My trusty (now 1TB) NAS streams all my music to it, so I don't need to have a PC turned on.
It plays internet radio (including those that are unmetered by my ISP, Internode), shows RSS feeds as a screensaver, has a simple-to-use search function, and the alarm clock supports different alarms for each day of the week, and can play any source the box can (Reggae Mondays, anyone?).
The software is all open-source and is very mature, so there are many add-ons and plug-ins available (although my NAS doesn't support all of them).
It natively supports ogg, flac (the two formats I care about the most), mp3 (obviously), wma, wav, aac, m4a and many others through on-the-fly transcoding (although my NAS can't transcode).
Oh! And it can be controlled by any browser (including full support for my phone browser!), meaning I can be sitting out on my verandah, and can pull out my phone to change the track/album/radio station to whatever I want. Hell yeah.
Oh! And you can play different things on both boxes (as you'd hope), or synch them together! You can also transfer playlists between the two, so I can keep on listening to the music I was listening to in the loungeroom when I go to bed.
I am in geek heaven!
I now need to decide on/purchase a pair speakers for the Squeezebox in the bedroom.
I was going to buy a cheap micro hi-fi, but I went into Allan's yesterday and saw some self-powered studio monitors with digital in (did I mention the Squeezebox has both coax and optical out?) for about the price I was willing to pay for the micro hi-fi. Not only would that be a neater package than a seperate amp, but the sound will doubtless be noticeably better.
I'm leaning toward the Edirol MA-15D's for $309, but have heard some good things about the very sexy Swan M200's, too. I haven't found a price yet, but I'm pretty confident they're more expensive. And then there's the Edirol MA-20D's (which I also don't yet have a price for, but will be more expensive).
Decisions, decisions.
As keen as I am for the speakers (so I can finally once again listen to music when going to sleep/waking up), I'll probably save for the next few weeks, rather than putting them on credit. Let's just hope I can refuse the itch.
I'm somehow meant to be fitting a new (replacement) PC into all of this, too.
*sigh* The life of a tech nerd.
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