Amps and hard drives?!?

[Risim]

Hi guys Im thinking of building somemore jukeboxes which will be music to Barry ears  ,lol. The thing is Im ordering parts and in my old juks I was using 1000w hometheaters but the problem is that when they fail I can't repair them.  I know my comp uses car amps in there jukeboxes. My question is, has anyone used this does it sound any good in know my comp juke dont sound good at all.  Maybe thats why they call me.  Any brands recomended are they stable?

My second question is about the hard drive.  I know that Barry has been recommending solid state drives for awhile now and coffee suggested mobo with os preinstalled.  Has anyone done this?  How many gigs will I need to run os and juke?

Thanks for the help.

[Mark Norville]

To try and give you some input and who knows maybe advice.

If obviously something goes down in your jukebox then you have to repair or replace. However when you sell to someone else, then you need to do legal things, such as stating that jukeboxes are covered by a years warranty anything other than that, then repairs or replacements are down to the customers, of course voiding warranty as much as possible if you suspect any damage to the units by either the jukebox hirer or a drunken customer, this would then fall under breaking terms and conditions, if they open it and try and repair it, then should fall down to their insurance if a customer breaks anything.

Secondly regarding car amps, again they break down so either way you would have to replace that as you wouldn't be able to repair it. The cheaper the amp the worse quality you get so you would need to look at budgets for the machine, so pretty much that is an open question. Also you need to factor in speakers, and room acoustics into that, no room is the same but people like both clarity and also bass.

To give an example you want hard core drum and bass music to sound as such without the sound sounding as if it should be a classical music jukebox, but then unless you spend a lot of money on amps, you are never going to get that kind of quality.

Thirdly in relation to hard drive, hard drives go down and SSD are reasonably more expensive, you could look at limiting the amount of tracks on a jukebox such as the big players do, where tracks are limited to 10,000 or I think it is 40,000 with the newer commercial machines.

At the moment I have 45.8 gig of mp3's plus graphics etc, that is just for 7,614 files and however many folders. You would be wanting to minimise your expenditure as much as possible, but with operating system and a decent amount of files you would need maybe a terabyte hard drive.

I personally am torn in two as I get sick and tired of doing MP3's and if you look at it like this, an artist releases say 12 tracks, 3 get released and 9 are unreleased, ok so you might get a super fan in that prefers the 9 that hasn't been released but music videos are so quick and easy, if I was in a commercial enterprise that is what I would look towards.

Regards

Mark

[Barcrest]

For the boot drive you can get away with 60gb SSD for windows and the jukebox. Then use a normal mechanical drive for the media. If you want it to boot up even quicker then raid 2 SSD's, this will also improve the general speed of loading things like fanart etc although this might not be that noticeable. Seagate do a reasonably priced 8tb USB drive that I use for media.

As for the amp I have heard good things about these.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/271992530382

You can get a bare bones version of the board apparently.

If you use a car amp make sure you have a big PSU in the computer you are taking the power from and you might need something to suppress the hard drive interfering with the sound. (I only had this happen with an old mechanical drive, I don't think an SSD would cause an issue).

I personally am torn in two as I get sick and tired of doing MP3's and if you look at it like this, an artist releases say 12 tracks, 3 get released and 9 are unreleased, ok so you might get a super fan in that prefers the 9 that hasn't been released but music videos are so quick and easy, if I was in a commercial enterprise that is what I would look towards.

Regards

Mark

I do agree music videos are the way forward. Having a large music collection is great but I would much prefer a vast music video collection.

[Risim]

Two things, wouldn't  a 32gig be enough for the main solid drive or must it be 64?  Its juat that I found a good dead on 32gig still waiting for a quote on 64gig.
Barry isnt that amp a bit small?  I mean in wattage output?

[Barcrest]

Two things, wouldn't  a 32gig be enough for the main solid drive or must it be 64?  Its juat that I found a good dead on 32gig still waiting for a quote on 64gig.
Barry isnt that amp a bit small?  I mean in wattage output?

Yeah a 32gb would be fine if you can find one. If you can get it cheap enough Raid 2 of them, also get sata III assuming your motherboard does that.

That amp is quite loud it depends on what you are running off it I guess. There is a 2 channel version here giving 100watt per channel.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-TDA7498-100W-100W-Class-D-Amplifier-Board-Computer-Amplifier/310956174740?_trksid=p2045573.c100034.m2102&_trkparms=aid%3D222007%26algo%3DSIC.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20131003150253%26meid%3Db2bb3b58888647f2ade3205ccd2002de%26pid%3D100034%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D8%26mehot%3Dpp%26sd%3D201291553900

[Risim]

Order amps give feedback soon. Thanks