My 9-yr old daughter recently heralded the arrival of the next generation of home entertainment with a simple question, "Daddy, can you get that hunk of junk out of my room?", pointing to a recently emptied 200 disc CD changer that used to hold my treasured music collection.
Introducing the Digital Media Receiver
And she's nearly right. While my CD changer is not exactly a hunk of junk, it's definitely no longer needed because we recently added a Digital Media Receiver (DMR) our home theater system. The DMR uses the home wireless network to access music files stored on PCs and then plays them in high fidelity in the living room. Over the years, I (legally) accumulated over 58gb of music files (about 1000 music CDs) on my PC and now I can finally listen to them in the home instead of just my desktop.
Convert your CD’s
If you're old enough to remember chucking your vinyl albums and repurchasing your favorites as CDs, converting your CDs into music files is much easier. First, you don't have to buy your music collection again. You simply feed the CDs, one by one, into your computer which then "rips" each track into an individual file.
What genre do we play tonight?
Second, a huge benefit of converting your CDs into music files is that ripping adds additional information, allowing you to listen according to artist, album, song name, or genre. When my wife and I sit down for coffee talk these days I choose the "ambient" genre and the DMR searches through thousands of files to bring us the perfect music regardless of artist or album. You just can't do this kind of stuff with "old fashioned" CDs. DMRs let you enjoy your music archive in a whole new way.
The best way to view the family photo album
Finally, in addition to just playing your favorite tunes, some DMRs can also display images on your TV. We amassed thousands of digital photos since our kids were born but all those pictures just sat on my hard drive. Instead of flipping through physical photo albums on the couch or watching slideshows on my computer, our family story comes alive in the living room on the big screen TV with high fidelity background music from a custom playlist, creating a whole new form of home entertainment.
Easy to do
DMRs have evolved to the point where today they are relatively easy to setup. All the music and photos are stored on your existing home computers. The DMR connects to the home theater system and home computer network (yet another good reason to get wifi – no cables). After installing the right software on the PC, follow a few configuration steps to get the DMR to recognize the network and you're up and running.
Where to go from here
There are plenty of resources available on the Web to learn more. Go to sites like Wikipedia.com, Cnet.com, and Pcmag.com and search for terms like "Digital media receiver" or "Digital Audio Receiver" and look for DMRs that can play a wide variety of audio, video, and picture formats. One of the newest entries in the market is Microsoft's Xbox 360, which is what we use. For a little more than what other DMRs cost, the Xbox also has a built-in DVD player and of course has great games so it might be worth a closer look.
Get started!
How can you prepare for this new wave of home entertainment? Get a large hard drive (250mb or more), rip your CDs (use Microsoft's free Windows Media Player), and categorize all your photos into folders. After finding the right DMR for you, all that's left will be to figure out how to chuck that "Hunk of junk" CD changer.
