music tech minefield

[Rusty Nuts]

I want/need some device/s to play music in my living room. A wardrobe full of cds, which I don't really want in the room. I've also got a technophobic partner who would rather just have "a little hifi system."
Who out there has a good sounding system - not necessarily loud, but good quality ( hi-fi used to have to meet din 45.500, but the term is used very loosely now)- which can be operated by someone who actively dislikes gadgets?
What, apart from phones, are people using these days instead of "the radiogram"?
If we're going to stream, wifi or bluetooth? - and why?
All advice welcome.
I've got a 500gb Android box hiding behind the tv, I imagine sticking the music on there then wifi or bluetooth to a speaker is the way we'll go, so what player app or interface will be easy to use and make finding music easy?
Thank you. I'll just go and dust the wax cylinders now.

[kwackboy]

I'm no tech geek but in in our place we use a wireless speaker that connects to our router via WiFi and anything that has music on that uses WiFi ,our TV , phones , hard drive gets played through the speaker .
All our gadget's are Samsung including our washing machine so everything connects relatively easy but if your android box has WiFi/Bluetooth it will connect to any good wireless speaker. Main players are Bose, Sonos, Samsung amongst others but there are cheaper versions out there but you get what you pay for. 
I can't vouch for others systems but we have a Samsung R1 speaker and it's great , if you have a big place you can buy as many as you want and place them anywhere in your house , they connect automatically to give you complete music coverage of your whole house .

[SimonW]

I would have thought the Android box was a suitable place for storing music/films, but no idea what you'd use to stream it. I'd use wifi - with the better range it should be available on any device throughout the house, unless of course you're just going to play it through a bluetooth speaker. (I use a headless Linux server here for backups and streaming music and films. The server is on a wired connection but most clients connect over wifi, mostly using Plex.) If you want very high quality then (most) CDs don't cut it, but if you're not that much of muso geek then ripping standard CDs with EAC (Exact Audio Copy) will give good results. There's various instructions around the web on how to best set it up. I rip to flac format. For ripping DVDs I use MakeMKV, output in mkv format (unsurprisingly!).

[strompy]

Been thinking about this myself recently. A bluetooth soundbar for the TV is one of the options I want to look into when I get time, although the sound quality is dependant on the device playing it....

[Hugh Mungus]

I plug my laptop into a small hi-fi via the AUX socket. It greatly improves the sound but it's a bit of a faff.
I was going to replace the hi-fi but it's not that big so I won't save much room and it's a Technics so whatever I get has to match the sound quality.
I also don't want to spend a lot.

Looks like I'll be sticking to my system unless someone comes up with a great suggestion.

[Wolfgang]

Rusty,
If poss use your wifi to stream your tunes rather than Bluetooth which is rubbish for high end audio.
I have a Sonos Play 1 system which streams my iTunes library through the router.
You can also access internet radio & use Spotify etc.
The boxes "daisy chain" so you can have music all around your home.
Not the cheapest solution, but it sounds great.

[CharlitTee]

Rusty Nuts, Son Number 2 is a musician and sound engineer. I emailed your question to him and below is his reply

Charlie



Well it depends what he means by an android box but it’s probably a ‘shield’ which like he says will be able to store all his music and then he can play it from there using the inbuilt app, though he’ll need to digitise his music first which is a laborious task so signing up for Spotify would cut that out and he could flog his CDs for about 20p. He could then get any nice small hi-fi he wanted, as long as it has an aux input, and run a cable from the TV’s headphone out into the system, using TV remote or tablet app to control it. I could recommend a Hi-Fi but would just be googling and anything by Sony, Denon, Cambridge Audio, etc, of a reasonable budget that was aesthetically acceptable would be perfectly good and loud enough. Ignore din numbers and other false promises; take some music you know well to a shop and have a listen to it. Then buy it online cheaper. Many Bluetooth / streaming systems are available and most modern systems will have options built in but if you don’t like phones and gadgets then don’t bother.

In fact this with a couple of speakers does everything and still caters for CDs.

https://www.denon.co.uk/uk/product/compactsystem/mini/rcdm41dab