Networking your music collection

I've tried a few methods but wondered what other folk's experiences have been.

Most of my collection is either FLAC or MP3, (Many Cd's but they rarely see light of day aside from getting ripped etc) held on a NAS and with reasonable Wi Fi coverage

My experiences in a nutshell

Airplay - I'm not happy with the sound quality, seems a noticeable drop in detail through even modest speakers and occasional pops can intrude from time to time.

Logitech Squeezebox - Needs an external amp or powered speakers....the bundled remote is slow and clunky but when paired with the ipad and android apps this is great - I was rolling it out in the house but logitech stopped making it so future support and expansion are in doubt.

Denon Ceol Picollo - great combi Ipod dock/network music player and amp - just add speakers, but pretty costly and the interface is rather clunky.

I am hoping to consolidate on a common interface and equipment any alternate suggestions?

I still buy CDs. I like to have physical copies of the albums I own, and I understand that CDs have better sound quality than MP3s and the like.

Mind you, I love Amazon's Autorip service, whereby one can buy something on CD and get an MP3 version of it thrown in. Most useful.

Loomis wrote:

I still buy CDs. I like to have physical copies of the albums I own, and I understand that CDs have better sound quality than MP3s and the like.

Mind you, I love Amazon's Autorip service, whereby one can buy something on CD and get an MP3 version of it thrown in. Most useful.

I tend to buy Cd then rip to FLAC which is lossless (my MP3's are mostly a legacy from a less enlightened time ^^), as with films and games I much prefer to own the physical media but more often than not actually still play from a central Hard drive or Network store. In some ways it's not that new an approach, I was always obsessed with scratches on vinyl, so I'd buy a record, immediately record it on a chrome cassette and carefully store the record for posterity or that odd rare special occasion!