Hello, new guy here. I've had a passion for a/v since I could pronounce "Klipsch Heresy" which there were 3 pairs of in my living room growing up, coupled with some nice hardware such as a pair of Luxman M-02s, a Robertson Sixty-Ten, and a variety of nice preamps and c.d. players such as the Musical Fidelity A3. They all had their moments of critisism but they got me in the game. After the Heresy's were replaced with a full Paradigm reference V.2 setup and as I started to get older my system started to sprout, looking something like this...

Paradigm Monitor 11 V.5
Paradigm Studio Sub 12

Hi. I'm new to this forum and comp. audio in general and have some questions. First my system is very modest - Parasound P/HP-830 preamp, Adcom GFA-535 amp, Cambridge Audio S30 speakers on stands, Athena powered sub in very small room of about 8'x10'. I've been using digital files for portable use (ipod) for a few years now and have been using EAC to rip mp3s. The mp3s can be used on just about anything and I liked that. But now I've become interested in the pc-as-a-music-server-thing.

I have a huge open reel collection (thousands of manufacturer's pre-recorded tapes) which includes some highly collectable stuff from the 50s and 60s on half track that was dubbed in real time from master tapes. I don't want to lose these performances to the aging of the tape and would like to dub them to 24 bit 192 kz sampled dvd-As but have not been able to find an appropriate recording device to make this possible.

After spending a fortune on equipment and music my spouse balked at the idea of spending more big bucks on room tunes, etc. So after checking out the various room tuning stuff at the local high end dealers to see what the stuff was and how it was placed, I went to Lowes and bought some cheap cardboard circular forms normally used for concrete in various diameters (dirt cheap!) and then went buy the dollar store to buy various sound absorption materials like sponges and the like.