Minimalist is an apt term, as the size of the electronics needed to store and reproduce music pretty darn well has shrunk to near zero. And you had the good sense to buy speakers from the thrift store, which is the best way to get hooked up with excellent quality speakers for not much dough.
Well done, sir.
I once saw a photo of someoneâs stereo system, circa 1961. They had a âSweet 16â speaker (a fad for a while, 16 small and cheap speakers in an array, the claim was the total package was great), nice and large, with the turntable sitting on top.
That should o wonders for the sound coming from that turntable, all kinds of feedback.
put a monitor on the same desk as my turntables once. learned the hard way. felt pretty dumb.
Iâve written to a few (like Bose) companies: why isnât there a stereo player (maybe with built-in amp, maybe not) that sits in my media center with the following:
Have I got a link for you!
Popular Electronics, April 1961
I doubt that the thing you want would ever exist as a product. Look at what the television companies do with the Linux computer thatâs part of every TV set nowadays: load it up with a crippled browser that only knows how to stream the stuff provided by the content providers that the TV makers cuts deals with.
Just put a low-end PC in your media center and run WinAmp on it.
No memos in minimalist week. They take up too much space.
You could achieve most of that with a tablet, and depending on the app, you could likely control it with your phone. Get a cheap Android and stick a big SD card in it for your music.
I still use a Logitech Squeezebox Touch to play all my music. It needs an external server, but I think everyone should have a media server setup in this day and age. I use an HP Microserver running FreeNAS. You can control the Squeezebox with your phone or a PC on the same network. Itâs very nice.
These days you can ever skip the amp for a single-source setup by using active speakers, which are pretty common now.
I was thinking a while back that todayâs dorm student just needs a smartphone and a pair of powered mini speakers (like AudioEngine A2s), and theyâd be sorted.
You can do this with a Raspberry Pi, a Pi-compatible sound card (the sound hardware on the Pi is terrible), and XBMC/Kodi.
I like @Ladyfingers suggestion better, fond as I am of tinkering. Kodi makes me want to punch myself in the face, itâs so bloody awkward to use. A Raspi and a basic linux setup with [$musicplayeryoulike] and Unified Remote set up on it and a smartphone would make me significantly less stabby. Given how cheap a basic tablet is, the lazy option is a pretty good deal mind. I use an old Lenovo notebook with a b0rked screen plugged into the amp & Tv cos thatâs what was lying around. Mind you, the collection of wires and mismatched technology plugged into big speakers that constitutes my living room isnât describable as âminimalistâ 
I just sent this picture to like everybody, theyâre gonna be pissed, I titled it Excellent Design.
And there are plenty of small fanless case PCs out there that look pretty nifty.
The drawback to a cased PC, unless youâre somehow running at using your phone as a controller and screen is that you need a screen and keyboard, whereas a tablet is all-in-one.
The benefit is you can do it without moving your lazy ass off the sofa.
One of the options, for sure - but I have to have a UI that the other member of the household can use without having my knowledge of technical things⌠WinAmp might not be that UI
Iâm not a big fan of Kodi, but it does the job, and recent Openelec builds can handle (some) external sound cards, which is important. The sound hardware on the Pi is better than a Soundblaster, but not by much. Tablets are usually better, but not great. Since my setup predates external sound capability on the Pi, what I do is feed the sound digitally through HDMI to an HDMI splitter ($12 from China) that converts the HDMI to optical out, then feed the optical out to a DAC (I use a FiiO D03K, which is low-end but pretty good for this job) then to my 70s-era maximalist stereo.
I did something along these lines.
I wanted to create a radio which simply downloads my podcast feeds and plays them on demand after seeing the RadioDan project and thinking âfinally, something I can use my RasPi withâ.
The more I thought about how to do it, the more I realised I donât need to use my Pi⌠I can replace it with a VM on my server running ubuntu, a padcatcher and apache. Scribble out a php file which generates the playlist dynamically using HTML5 audio tags then just spend a couple of quid on some NFC tags, program them with the web addresses of my internal podcasts server and use the NFC reader on my phone to auto play.
Iâm still tempted to find an old 30s or 40s radio, tear the innards out and replace it with a small PC with an NFC reader for the aesthetic value.
I gave my brother-in-law a late fifties Zenith AM/FM tube table radio with an aux input, which he uses to listen to his ipod. Much better sound than that plastic Bose thing he used to think was the beeâs knees. Big 5x7 speaker! Warm tube sound!
Traditionally, people do this to get better sound quality than crappy computer audio but
Yer kinda shooting yourself in the foot there. 1/8th inch headphone out? Weakest link in the audio chain as they say.
That might sound annoyingly snooty to say, but one of my prized possessions (before it crapped out) was a boombox with RCA inputs (relatively unusual at the time). Even with a boombox amp and boombox speakers, the difference in audio from a computer between 1/8th inch stereo and RCA outputs was shockingly noticeable. I donât think you donât have to be any kind of audiophile to hear it.
I would get some sort of iPhone RCA out dongle or just dig some old lappy out of the closet and get a sound card for it off of ebay for cheap.
I picked up a portable bluetooth speaker and the speaker/amp quality almost doesnât matter; it is not possible to get decent audio to the speaker. The wireless possibilities are all compressed, or you have the choice of 1/8th inch stereo plug.
1/8th inch stereo plugs have become a ubiquitous plague upon us all.
