Ever counted your CD or DVD collection? In our experience, music and video collections are ever increasing with many people exceeding 1000 CDs or DVDs. For many, displaying the collection adds to the ambience of a music room or home cinema. For others a large and diverse collection becomes more and more difficult to pick what you want when you want it.
Music and video servers are designed to help. By providing the means to store and organise your collection you can re-discover all those long lost tracks or films whenever it takes your mood.
Just a PC right?
No. Music and video storage is more complex than it might seem. The best way to think about it is retrieval, not storage. The ultimate goal of storing your collection is to enable easy retrieval whenever you want it. Dedicated music and movie servers are designed for optimised storage, searching and playback. Some include features to create your own trailers and interludes for your own DVD showings.
To understand some more of the solutions provided by dedicated media servers we should look at some of the many features they provide:
- Multi-format storage - Many music servers will store your music in both uncompressed and compressed forms. By storing in this way you get the ultimate quality when played at home yet synchronised to your iPod or other portable device.
- Multi-stream output - When used as part of a multi-room audio solution many music servers are scalable to many simultaneous different outputs.
- Intelligent Categorisation - With detailed information downloaded about each disc you can search in many different ways. Conductor, composer, song name, genre and in some case many more options are available.
- Hassle-free storage - For many, using a PC to store music is the best answer. For some however who want the simplicity of simply inserting the disc and knowing the rest is automatically taken care of is paramount.
I prefer high-end HiFi and Cinema ...
Every solution is different and there are solutions available for every part of the spectrum. Many of the big names in HiFi have developed solutions to ensure you get the ultimate in music and video reproduction. Upsampling, lossless storage and playback are some of the many features used to give you the same if not better reproduction than the CD. Some servers even support SACD, DVD-Audio and other lesser known standards to help ensure your entire collection is covered.
Whatever the size of scope of your music or DVD collection, we can help ensure you get the most from your media server either for a single room or as part of a whole house solution.