Why?

Yeah, John, why??

Always a good question. In fact, one can make a continuing reputation for oneself and become highly regarded just by asking this question continuously - e.g. Socrates. Of course, one also risks becoming known as a PitA, in which case not everything may be entirely positive cf. Socrates.

I have acquired over time but not more recently than 10-15 years ago

• A large, relatively expensive stereo system, set up in the front room
• Chord CPA3200E, 1200C pre/power - it's a monster!
• Naim CDS 2 - two boxes
• Quad ESL63 - incredible sound, but large and tricky to place
• A number of remote controls
• A collection of CDs, probably <= 1000 - never enough, but space...?!

Meanwhile, things have moved on. 

• Computer disk style storage for digital recordings
• Cheap, powerful DACs
• Cheap, powerful DSP - even tiny single board computers like RPi have enough power to run many processing algorithms in (pretty close to) realtime
• Distributed, network "software" storage, processing and rendering
• Media management and replay management "apps", usually on smart phones and tablets
• Internet streaming of all sorts of material

So I thought it would be instructive to investigate the possibilities of these things, with the potential to supplement or even replace the big stereo, and certainly to open up the CD collection to easier browsing and even serendipitous random playing!

So - things to work on, in no particular order (which maybe in itself is a problem!):

• Disk array for storage
• Ripping of CDs to disks
• Audio file format for the ripped material, or separately acquired material
• Media server to present files to consumers
• Tagging, Indexing etc. - this is crucial, it would be great to have genres or moods that meant something, and performers too; sufficient flexibility to handle the classical world would be wonderful
• Networking; wireless is easiest, but it's not really necessarily sufficiently high bandwidth; the bit depth and sample rate has an impact, although 16/44.1k is probably not too strenuous and most material will be that
• Rendering device(s); this is basically the front end streamer and the DAC; lots to look at here, including the base platform of the device (a computer!) and the DAC, its connection to the render, and the material it can convert - this is really important because that has an effect right back to the audio file format and storage 
• Control application(s) to browse and cue up music
• Amplification and speakers; these are mentioned together because it's likely that I would want to use an active speaker setup, so the amps are intimately tied into the speakers
• DSP usage; this is basically two topics, the active crossovers required to drive the active speaker amplifiers, and any speaker / room equalisation 

Of course, this is a journey, and it's likely that some bits will be sketched out, and get replaced later. I can see that disk storage could be conflated with the media server platform e.g. USB disks stuck on an RPi, maybe migrating to a "proper" RAID setup with built-in processing, like Synology in the future. But it's important that big things are done right to prevent lost of re-work, so it's unlikely that I'd rip a lot of CDs to a specific format until I've ensured that it's the "right" one, otherwise there's a big investment in rework if I've ripped loads already!