Sunday, January 18, 2009

Media Center Build - Part 1


Building a Music Server has been one of the projects that I've wanted to do for the longest time. However, I needed that the Server not look like a computer as I wanted it to reside with my current Audio Components.

HTPC cases are all the rage right now, but the prices fall nowhere within my budget. Which is in the same range as President Bush's popularity. Zero.

I needed this built - and soon. I'm almost finished with the Turntable Monitor and the Squeezebox Mod. Both of these rely of having somewhere to read the information off.

I lucked out at the ReStore when I happened upon a very nicely maintained receiver from the Seventies. It looked about the right size to hold a PC Power Supply and a Motherboard with any daughter cards if and when required.

Turns out that the unit was a Luxman. Anyways, I plugged it in and it did not work. Could it have been repaired?? I plead the 5th on that.

I've so far gutted the unit, removed all of the PCB's desoldered the front panel controls from their PCB's as these will screw back onto the front panel as dummy units. The only things that will work on the front panel are of course the lights, which will light up the tuning dial, the Power button and reset button. The FM Stereo indicator will light up as the PC power indicator and the FM Signal Meter will act as the Hard Disk Drive activity indicator.

On the inside, I do not need anything powerful and will be installing one of my older machines running a scaled down version of Windows XP.

More on that soon.

3 comments:

Avinash said...

That Luxman has such retro chic - much like my wardrobe! Ok, I'm lying - but about which one?

Unknown said...

Let me fathom a guess here - Your wardrobe!!!!!

Avinash said...

Sad, but true!

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