For the past year my wonderful wife has been complaining about the hand-me-down stereo system that we have. Although the system is relatively good the CD player has packed up and the amplifier takes about 20 minutes to warm up due to a bad capacitor that I haven't taken the time to fix. We temporarily replaced it with a boom box but the CD player gave out on that to? We also purchased and under-the-counter CD player and radio but last week the CD player on that died to. What is the deal with CD player reliability or is it just me?
Anyway, I would like to replace it with a network (802.11b/g or Ethernet) enabled stereo system but it appeared that no such thing existed unless of course one goes with a Windows Media Center PC or Linux. The problem with Windows Media Center PCs, however, is they require a monitor and I just want a stereo (I don't want a TV, I am not disciplined enough for that.) A Windows Mobile powered stereo an an x86 processor would be great and I would love the challenge of trying to build one but writing drivers for FM receivers, CD players and the like seems beyond my time constraints. This leaves me with Linux but this too seems like a time sink waiting to happen.
Today I ran across a pretty the Cyruslink system which appears to be running a Pocket PC OS. This seems to be an ideal solution except for one significant factor: £2,999 just for the "lowend" Linkserver.
5:25:26 PM
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