I first came up with the idea of recycling old car audio equipment to build a garage stereo after building a work bench in my garage and liking how uncluttered everything looked. The old stereo was a cheap bookshelf system that took up a lot of real estate and just looked dumb. I knew the car stereo system from my teenage youth was up in a closet at my retired parents' home, so when they came out to visit I asked them to take it along. A few hours of magic and I knew I could have a unique system for the garage.

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If you have any questions on setting up a whole house audio system after reading this article, just visit the forums and I'll answer almost immediately.

Part 1 of the series is the hack version of whole house audio that can be put together basically for free. In Part 2 I'll explore how to do a more professional home audio solution without the need for satellite devices, and it will be done for right around $1000.

It's attractive to want to listen to your music in any room in the house. With the apparent death of the CD (that should get some comments about music quality) in favor of purchased downloads through iTunes and streaming of services like Pandora, wanting to listen to music stored on the computer without burning a CD is a reasonable request. Today I want to show you how to do this pretty much free, with stuff you have lying around the house.

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If you have any questions about specific setup of the Vortexbox after reading this article, please post over on the forums and I'll answer straight away.

What if you could take every DVD you own, or watch with Netflix, and move it to digital format (MKV and MP4) for easy viewing at the push of a remote button anytime you please? What if you could also take every CD you own and rip it to both FLAC and MP3 format and have them available for listening via DLNA, iTunes, Sonos, Squeezeserver, and Windows share? What if I told you that the only thing you had to do was open the drive door, pop in the CD or DVD, and the appliance does all the rest, with no intervention from you? What if I also told you that you could do this with an ancient computer, one that's probably just sitting in your basement collecting dust, and it's all FREE? Sound too good to be true?
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