I was thinking of getting something like this to store all my CDs and have them available at the touch of a few, OK tens of buttons. My dumb questions are:
Do I need to buy a receiver as well?
I know I need to supply speakers, but the ones I have are the kind with loose wires on the end that connect to the boom box. I assume I can’t use those? Or could they be adapted somehow?
Any opinions are welcome too.
Yup, this connects to a receiver, just as any CD unit would (cables most likely come with the unit). Your speakers also connect to the receiver, then when you want to play your CDs, you turn on the receiver, then this unit (often called a CD jukebox), hit Play, adjust the volume level on the receiver, and away you go.
I’'ve had the Sony 200-CD jukebox for a few years, and it is great. You can listen to music all day, just going through the discs numerically, or you can create programs and pick a selection of them. You can pick individual tracks in any order on each CD too.
As is the case with many such devices, you can do a lot of things, many quite complicated. However, just to pick a CD to play, or play several in a row, is very easy.
Depending upon the quality of the audio you want, you have a big choice of receivers. If you are not too fussy, you can get one for a very reasonable price, even a used one.
Speakers also range all over the place in cost, and unless you really want high quality sound, you can find some new or used ones for a reasonable price. Speakers are very important though in reproducing good sound, so they likely will cost more than the receiver if you want a really good pair.
We had one similar to that (and yes, you do need a receiver) and ended up selling it on Craigslist. I envisioned us using it like a personal jukebox. The reality was that we’d take the cds out to listen to in the car, or on the upstairs stereo, and were constantly wrangling cds. Eventually there were fewer inside the unit than out. When we did put them back in, we were lazy about order (ours was not the type where you could program which cd was in which slot - it had a book with numbered sleeves for the album art instead). Then when you wanted to play something in particular, you had to spin the thing around looking for where you left it.
I think it ultimately depends on your listening habits. If you only listen to your cds in one location of the house, it should work well. Or if you’ve ripped everything to an ipod that you use elsewhere. (we had ours in the pre-ipod dark ages) We’ve got a five disk player and two big cd holding books instead that works better for us.
That’s what I’ve got now and I’m trying to get away from the book, where I have to shift everything around to keep them in alphabetical order when I get new ones. I only have the CD player in the house (none in the car) so this could work.
Thanks for all the info!