As a kid, I remember my parents having a HiFi system in our house at the time. It had everything: an amplifier, two big fuckoff speakers, CD and DVD player. It was an awesome system which was also hooked up to the big ass rear projection TV that we also had in our living room. We would rent DVDs and we would watch them together.
Sadly times moved on. We moved to a different city, and the HiFi system was pretty much left abandoned and sad. The amplifier’s itself ended up dying, and the speakers themselves eventually got thrown out, since without an amp, they were essentially useless, not to mention the space they took up, they were pretty big to be honest. I did manage to keep a single speaker for myself, and with my amp I built in the middle school electronics workshop (yes it was a thing here LMAO), I would play my awful dubstep music, much to the anger of my mom (sorry mom). Eventually that little shitty amp would also bite the dust, and that speaker was later thrown out as well. The CD player on the other hand was left to collect dust, and eventually would be forgotten about on the top of the living room cabinet.
To be honest, I been wanting to build a HiFi system to play music on. I been wanting to find some good set of speakers, a amplifier, a CD player and the desire to start a big ass CD collection. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to EBay (those motherfuckers banned me literally a couple minutes after creating that account) which means that I would need to hunt these components on Facebook Marketplace. Additionally I could probably save some money by reusing the CD disc changer that I already have to be honest.
Facebook Marketplace is pretty much the single reason why I keep a Facebook account in 2025. and while you can find great deals, most of the time it’s people trying to flip junk onto the unsuspecting purchaser with a dumbass price markup. I tend to find electronics and computers to be specifically bad in this case, with people so desperately wanting to get a quick buck by selling shitty hardware to those who don’t know any better. There also is local flea markets that I could visit, where I can get some cool shit for pretty cheap too.
So I guess the plan will be to find an amp, a pair of decent speakers (i don’t think I would need any subwoofers at all), a CD player (if I decide to use something else that isn’t the dusty one stored away), a small computer that can play my existing digital library, and finally another physical media player. I kinda want to try out MiniDisc: It is a format that I don’t have any experience with, but i think it is very fucking cool and I do want to get my hands on it, however it seems that MiniDisc anything is non existent here, or when it shows up, it ends up being very very overpriced which kinda sucks to be honest.
I also considered getting a cassette deck too, but like the MiniDisc, I really don’t have any experience with those aside from that cassette adapter that converts a 3.5” jack into something the cassette deck could “read” and play. It was pretty coot to be honest. We used to have one of these in the family van, and it worked neatly with the built-in cassette deck.
I think the easiest thing to do on that list is probably finding a mini PC, a bit of storage, and maybe a Bluetooth adapter (or figure out a way that I can stream from my phone via WiFi or something). This is mostly for me to be able to play my music library that I have collected so far, which is around 140 GB of music files. The OS would probably be some Linux system, mayhaps Fedora or something along those lines.
I guess the end goal is to set up a media center of sorts. Maybe have something like a 40 inch TV (since there is not much more space for a larger TV) hooked up to a media PC so I can watch movies on there. The HiFi setup would pull double duty as the audio source for the TV and a separate way to play music on there. I think trying to find a TV that doesn’t have any smart TV bullshit is pretty hard nowadays, but I guess we’ll cross that mountain when we get there. I also want to get more storage for the server, since 512GB is not enough and it was only really intended to be a stop gap solution. The long term solution would be to get TrueNAS installed (or fuck it, maybe reinstall Fedora Server if I feel like suffering lmao), get two large hard drives, set up a RAID setup and set everything as it was. On the server I want to have Jellyfin installed, so I can keep my totally not pirated movies available at all times.
Tangent 1: YT breaking Freetube, and the cat and mouse game
I kinda forgot on the last post I made about Freetube to mention that Google has started doing this sort of cat and mouse game where they do slight changes that break third party clients, then the devs behind these clients scramble to fix the issue, and then a couple weeks (sometimes days) later Google does some fuckery again to break those same clients again, and so on goes the cycle. This happens for pretty much every third party client. I remember not being able to use Newpipe for a long ass while because it would fail when it tried to play any sort of video. Recently Google decided to fuck over Freetube with a change that I don’t understand completely really, but all it does is prevent Freetube from loading anything properly. It took the FT devs a couple days to fix. I had to use Invidious for the time being and it worked okay-ish.
Also fuck Google for doing this bullshit.