Imusyk Media - Digital Audio
Digital audio receivers are a great new piece of kit for any audiophile, music lover or technology addict. The idea is simple: get all of that audio sitting on you PC into the rest of the house. Who wants to sit at a computer just to listen to music? And why use the little speakers that came with your PC when you have a perfectly good hi-fi, a device made for listening to music properly, sitting in the corner? A digital audio receiver solves these problems by allowing the library of music you have collected to become available from your hi-fi stack. Whether the music is downloaded, ripped from CDs or even created by you, if you're one of the growing number of bedroom musicians that have sprung up since PCs became powerful enough and cheap enough for us all to make music with them, a digital audio receiver brings it to the living room. Now there really is no need for that CD collection that sits gathering dust in the age of music over the Internet.
The digital audio receiver does its magic by being connected to your home network. Different models offer different methods of connection, but they're all essentially the same. Some connect to your wi-fi hub, others are physically connected with network cable, some are even connected to the phone socket, for those of you with a home PNA network (Home Phoneline Networking Alliance). Most of the current digital audio receivers on the market require some software to be installed on your PC. This software acts as a local server, letting the digital audio receiver have access to your digital music collection. On the PC, the software is configured with the locations of you music files, which it then catalogs. The digital audio receiver will then query the server software and allow the user to select a track to play. When a track is selected, the server software loads the audio and then "streams" it to the digital audio receiver. Streaming is just a technical term for passing the data to the digital audio receiver fast enough to allowing the digital audio receiver to begin playing instantly, without running out of music. This means that although the audio has to be moved across the network, it is surprisingly fast. No need to wait for the entire song to be downloaded before playing. You can find out more about radio receivers. Apart from the obvious benefit of having all of your music available from your hi-fi, the one piece of equipment made for listening to music properly in your home, there are other side-benefits. You can see the details of what you're listening to, such as track name, artist, album title. All of your music is centralized and on the same medium, so no more swapping CDs or being forced to listen to a whole album because you don't want to go in and change the record.
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