DJ with NX80v

[iluvmypda]

Hello all, I'm a high school student. I'm part of this committe that does things for the school. We are having a dance and I want to know is it safe to hook my NX to a reciever to play music from it. Thanks in advance.

[ricleo]

it is safe, but you would need at least a 1 Gig CF or 1 Gig MSPro to have enough music to last through a long dance with a good variety of tunes encoded at a decent bitrate.

[(oyo)]

Wouldn't it be easier to use a... CD Player???? Or if you only have MP3, then converte it and burn it into cd.

[r0b456]

Yeah, but you would need to have a CD changer that can hold like 200 discs. That costs money. And takes up space.


If you already have the NX80, you might as well use it.

A 1gb CF card or Memory Stick will have about 975mb of useable disk space. Guesstimate that the average MP3 is about 4mb (@ 128 bit encryption) and you figure you can fit about 243 songs on 1 card. Assume that the average song is about 3 minutes, that's 729 minutes, or 12 hours of audio.

It's been a while, but I do not recall any 12 hour school dances. You should be fine. Even a 512mb CF card would probably do fine, and you can pick one up for under $200. And if you don't want to use hacked apps, etc, then you can use multiple memory sticks. A 512mb Sony Memory Stick is about $250, while a 256mb is about $100. So you can buy 2 256mb Memory Sticks for just a little more than 1 512mb CF card or a little bit less than 1 512mb Memory Stick. And you'd have about 6 hours of CD Quality music.


As far as the quality between a 128 bit MP3 and a CD, I would say there is always going to be SOME loss with MPEG compression. But the NX80 has Great sound. Better than my iPod actually. And I can't really think of any High School student who doesn't listen to MP3's all the time, so I highly doubt anyone would really notice if you used high quality MP3's rather than CD's. Most radio stations use digital music from a hard drive rather than off of cassettes or CD's any more.

Just walk on down to RadioShack and get yourself an 3.5mm headphone jack cable (it'll have a 3.5mm jack on both ends) and then a 3.5mm to standard stereo adapter (it's a black plastic piece about an inch and a half long). Plug the 3.5mm end into the headphone jack on your NX80 (or the control wand for easy control) and the larger end into the Line In port on your stereo, wire your speakers, and you should be all set. The NX80 has things bass boost and volume leveling, but if I were you I would turn them off and instead use the equalizer settings on the stereo to fine-tune the output. Of course, you will want to have your NX80 cradled while playing the music and plugged into the AC so that you don't drain your batteries unnecessarily.

Depending on how picky you are, or maybe a bit of a perfectionist, you may want to demo the setup for yourself and maybe even a few friends after school or at home, just to make sure that the audio quality is acceptible -- you may find that you will hear a lot of extra distortion through the stereo speakers than you normally hear through headphones, etc, and decide that you want to go to 256 bit encoding on your MP3's. Or you may decide that it's not worth it entirely. It'll save you a lot of headaches and worrying later on if you test it out and make sure it works beforehand. And the stereo adapter only costs like $8 so it's no big loss.



Hope this helps.

-Rob

[r0b456]

Oh, and this is VERY important:


MAKE SURE YOU KEEP THE NX80 FAR, FAR AWAY FROM THE SPEAKERS, AS THEY HAVE LARGE MAGNETS AND WILL FLASH THE RAM ON YOUR NX80 AS WELL AS YOUR STORAGE CARDS


PC speakers and little external speakers for walkmans and PDA's (Like Creative's new TravelSound speakers) are magnetically shieleded to be safe to use near PC's, etc. But great big huge stereo speakers are not. I had a friend of mine, many years ago, go to a Christmas party and leave his Newton sitting on a large speaker while he socialized. Later that night he picked up his Newton and found that the speaker had completely erased it.

Be Careful.

[(oyo)]

All you need is a good boombox and lots of CDs... Don't tell me non of your highschool friends don't have a boombox...

[r0b456]

A boombox?


Dude -- Whoa.

What kind of High School did you go to?



Why buy a boombox? Why juggle all those CD's? Why have to schedule all those playlists? If not a boombox, then a multi-disk CD Changer.

That's all really silly if you Already own an NX80 and a larger memory stick or CF card. It's not like anyone's telling him to go buy a $600 PDA and a $500 microdrive for the single purpose of playing music at a High School dance. I'm just saying that if he already has an NX80, and he already uses it for music (Meaning he Already has at least 1 512mb card), then he might as well go for hooking it up to the stereo system that they are setting up for the dance. The only thing it will cost him is a couple bucks for the extra long headset cord and the stereo plug adapter. That's a lot cheaper than buying a boombox or a CD changer.


The guy wanted to know Can it be done, and if so, Is it safe. The answer to both questions is Yes. Just make sure that the NX80 isn't sitting next to some huge sub-woofer or something. The system he is going to be connecting to is probably large and the speakers are more than likely several feet away from the actual receiver. So I don't think he would have any problems at all.