CD Player to wireless/network

Shaggz

Shaggz

A strong 7
I have a pretty extensive CD collection and have no way of playing them other than an old portable CD player. I'm looking for advice/recommendations on an inexpensive and easy way to play CDs on my wireless speakers; currently 3 Sonos 1s. I have no intention of running wired speakers, and may look to add a sound bar and sub woofer and possibly a record player. @jmanic suggested staying in the Sonos ecosystem; would this be the best overall option for what I'm trying to accomplish?
 
Rip them all to a hard drive - put them in the cloud.
Use favorite streaming player to play them.

if you are an apple person, i think they checksum the cd vs actually ripping it (itunes match),
then just add it to the library - very quick. It is then available on all your apple devices.
There are some add'l steps to connect sonos.
 
Patrick said:
Rip them all to a hard drive - put them in the cloud.
Use favorite streaming player to play them.

if you are an apple person, i think they checksum the cd vs actually ripping it (itunes match),
then just add it to the library - very quick. It is then available on all your apple devices.
There are some add'l steps to connect sonos.
Click to expand...
This. Pay the boy child $.50 a cd to rip and house them somewhere.
 
Another vote for ripping. Sadly I have no idea where my physical CDs landed after a few moves around the time of my wedding. But, I've got all them MP3s!

Some of the Sonos boxes (connect, connect amp, and possibly the current version of these models) have an aux input. If you go used make sure you snag the S2 compatible version, assuming that's what your system is on. I recently picked up one for $200 on ebay and I run it into the pre-amp on my living room head unit.

Haven't tested the aux input myself, since I just have my main PC on the Sonos network to share out the MP3 collection as my "Music Library" in Sonos. Easy enough to test out w/ one album. Anyway, I'm assuming the aux is the "Line-In" source on the app.

Screenshot_20230122-111753~2.png
 
Norm said:
Is this a thread of people who once owned 8-tracks, and now refuse to pay for Spotify?

Because the answer is Spotify. It already has all your stuff on it.
Click to expand...

apparently you misspellt Pandora.

and yeah, i can rip an 8 track through the aux port of the album ripper from the 8track/cassette/am/fm thingy that is replacing the leg on one of my basement desks.
 
Norm said:
Is this a thread of people who once owned 8-tracks, and now refuse to pay for Spotify?

Because the answer is Spotify. It already has all your stuff on it.
Click to expand...
Finally caved and upgraded to Spotify Family. Some of the CDs are not available, and agree with @rlb hate the UI.

Good point on S2 > S1, will start combing for used gear.

No Apple but have an older Widows 10 box, so I guess that will work. So the answer is external storage, cloud or both. Is there native software to rip or do I need third party? Regarding external storage, does it need to be connected to a computer for Sonos to access or just on the wifi network?
 
Rip to NAS. Does Sonos not have a line in if you wanted to manually swap CD’s like a pleb?
 
Perhaps a Bluetooth transmitter receiver would work if your wireless speakers work with Bluetooth.
You wood hook the Bluetooth transmitter receiver in transmitter mode to a receiver/amp connected to the cd player, and the speakers if Bluetooth capable would receive the sound.
Depending on your CD player, it might be possible to connect a Blue tooth transmitter receiver directly to it, and transmit the sound without including a receiver or such unit - although this might not be possible if your cd player does not amplify. I mean it might work if your cd player is a boom box, but might not work if it is a stand alone cd player.

You'd still play the actual CDs, and would not have to have them ripped and stored digitally and cataloged in order to play.



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And I guess the overarching question is what is quality loss when converting from CD to digital format?
 
Shaggz said:
And I guess the overarching question is what is quality loss when converting from CD to digital format?
Click to expand...
no lossy when playing music from the cds in the approach i outlined. Although I imagine wireless transmission to wireless speakers is lossy itself.
 
Shaggz said:
And I guess the overarching question is what is quality loss when converting from CD to digital format?
Click to expand...

Ripping is adjustable from lossless from the CD (cause it's already encoded) to your favorite psycho-acoustic encoder ie aac.
With disk space cheap, and networks fast, higher bitrates are not a problem.
 
Sorry for the long post.

Another vote for ripping. As @Patrick said with disk space being cheap and network bandwidth not much of an issue i would go lossless ripping. Pick a lossless format that Sonos supports flac,wav,aiff,alac and enjoy. If you already have Apple iTunes use that to rip cd’s if not dbpoweramp or eac are the other options. Dbpoweramp costs around 30 eac is free.

I used to use dbpoweramp to rip to wav. Now I basically stream via Deezer and Qobuz which have lossless streaming option. I know both Deezer and Qobuz is supported by Sonos and they have a free tier version available that you can try it out which is bit better than mp3 but not cd quality. I signed up for Deezer Premiun during Christmas sale around $6 a month for year.

If you have Amazon Prime you have access to Prime Music also. Just not sure if Sonos has support built in or not or if the stream is lossless (that is included as part of Music Unlimited with prime). If already using Apple devices Apple Music is another option on Sonos.
 
Physical media is dead, and manually ripping your physical media is ridiculous. Just pick any streaming service.
 
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Magic said:
Rip to NAS. Does Sonos not have a line in if you wanted to manually swap CD’s like a pleb?
Click to expand...
Nope, you need the Sonos Connect like @rlb got, or their Port to connect wired sources.

Back when i began ripping all my CDs, the weak link to streaming from a PC/NAS was finding an app/platform that would allow you to actually navigate a huge library of files.
Not sure if something has solved this, but I’m guessing maybe the cloud based options might.
 
Shaggz said:
And I guess the overarching question is what is quality loss when converting from CD to digital format?
Click to expand...
CDs are are encoded at 16-Bit/44.1 kHz so as long as you rip to that standard you shouldn't be losing anything (or much). There are lossless formats you can rip to but the file sizes will obviously be larger. FLAC is the format that I used to use back in the 60s when I was still doing this kind of thing.

Don't listen to the naysayers on physical media. At the least it will help you get off the couch. And there is something about actually being able to touch something.

If your CD player has a headphone out, you can hook up one of those bluetooth transmitters that @jackx pointed out. Sound quality probably won't be the best, but depending on your setup and amount of other noise in the house you may not even notice.

If you have the receiver or amplifier that you used to use with the CD player, you can hook up the bluetooth transmitter to it directly as well.
 
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