No more physical media for me!
After way too long putting it off, I finally ripped and backed up my entire physical collection of Blu-ray audio, SACD, DVD-Audio, and a pile of CDs. Honestly it's been one of the best rabbit holes I've gone down in years.
The Atmos discs in particular are jaw-dropping on my new setup. Full lossless object-based audio streaming in the ceiling speakers over the network to my Denon — no compromises, no lossy passthrough nonsense.
The workflow that finally made it feel like I wasn't missing something:
- LosslessExtract handled the ripping of all Hires formats discs and preserves (TrueHD Atmos, DTS-X, DSD —etc)
- Kodi on my Nvidia Shield serves as the front-end — the library integration is seamless, cover art, metadata, the works. It also handles the bitstreaming handoff to the Denon perfectly.
- My Mac sits on the network as the NAS with a 4TB SSD and KODI talks to it directly — no extra server software needed
The Shield (bottom right corner of the TV in the pic) now bitstreams everything — TrueHD, Atmos, DTS:X FLAC, DSD — straight to the Denon (bottom left). Kodi's audio passthrough settings make this dead simple once you know where to look. there are 4 or 5 toggles in the settings for each codec
Replaced my Oppo with this setup and genuinely can't believe I waited this long. The Oppo was great but being tied to physical discs in 2026 just doesn't make sense for me anymore when you can have your whole library one click away in Kodi with bit-perfect output. Only remaing thing is a few acoustic panels.
Happy to answer questions about the the workflow, Kodi setup for lossless audio, or the Shield → Denon bitstreaming config. What formats are you all archiving from?