Dealer needs input, next wave of gear?

I use an i-book and an external 80 gig hard drive to store
1,000 CD's in slightly compressed form. I use this to store CD's I have ripped to the hard drive.

I connect from the headphone jack to analogue L & R inputs in pre-pro.

I certainly do not use this system for critical listening.

I mostly use this "player" for background music for parties.
I let guests make play-lists and it is quite fun to have everyone participate in the music selection for the evening culling songs from 1,000 CD's.

I would be interested in a higher quality solution that does
everything I can do with my set-up. My set-up is connected
to the internet via airport. I scroll through titles on
a 12" i-book screen. I can rip CD's to the hard drive using several different gradations of compression or I can rip them completely uncompressed.

What is needed is a player with these attributes plus a big
enough hard drive to store about 1,000 CD's uncompressed that can output the music with high quality sonics. It would be even better if the unit could upsample the music.

I don't know how this would all be accomplished. I just know that I have seen several products [Escient, Yamaha]
try to address this and the ones I've seen do not present
an upgrade from what I currently have.

Hope that helps.

Rob

I'm not even sure if I understand the questioin, but let me tell you this!
I'm busy and not very organized.
Loose CD's all the time and my 600 plus collection is not even in alphabetical order!

Windows Media Player 9 has changed my life!
Like many of us, I was looking down on people who listen to MP3's.

But a few of you may know, that WM9

HAS A LOSSLES CODEC!

Now needless to say the compression you get is only about 2:1, but it will sound as good or better (!) then any CD transport! (You can come to my house bring your rig!).

Here is the deal, not sure if you remember but Microsoft Has purchased PMI (Pacific Microsonics) the creator of HDCD and the Model 1 and two converters (used by all major players in mastering!)

Microsoft was obviously not interested in the hardware, so my company (euphonix.com) has picked up the mfg and support of the model two converters.

ASK YOURSELF THIS!
Why did MS want PMI?

WM9 and it's lossless codec my frineds is the shit!
(That's all im going to say about the MS PMI connection)

WM9 Pro (96/24 in 5.1 channels!!!) is already hear!!!
Soon there will be online subscribtion service to HD MUSIC!
Streamed over your dsl and will cikc your cds butt!

Upsamled and buffered transport for over 10k are insane.
First off everything is buffered when you play it from a PC.

ANyway...so you say ok, but its only 2:1 and I got 1000 cd's. I got 600 disk on a 250gb Drive I got from frys for $200!

A GOOD PCI SOUND CARD WITH DIGITAL OUT IS A MUST!
On board spdif outputs on motherboards and all the soundblaster cards sample rate convert so they can't be used for any critical listening.
But if you get one from Midiman for $150 or so you will be fine.
So I ran my SPDIF out to my Classe SSp75 and never looked back!

Got a handhald PC that uses windows xp's remote desktop feature, so I sit in the sweetspot with my fujitus pan PC and controle the univers. Any song I ever owned on cd is only a pen click away!!! My friends, this allowed me love music again...(till...my first sacd player..)

Now I can find all my music, I can burn cd's for the car and best off! I can listen to all my mysic over wireless ehternet in every room I got a pc in!
(I have all my old hifi gear in different rooms and a cheep pc a good way to put my old fancy gear like a countroupoint da10 to use!)

I still have a Marantz 8400 for SACD and DVDA a DEnon 2900 for DVDV and my cd's are on the shelf.

So although the WM9 Lossless files I got I beleive sound az awesome as PCM can, I'm said to say....

After just a few weeks of SACD, I can't find any enjoyment in PCM anymore!

All that told, what I want is what I'm going to build.
SO more in this in 12 months...

Let me direct you to http://audiomonument.com who make a product called "a la carte Personal Music Library". New on the market, it has excellent audiophile features like archiving vinyl, uncompressed storage (most rely on MP3) and a 10.4" color touchscreen control (most rely on either TV or Crestron ($$$$))

I use escient cd management for my general distributed audio. The new fireball is an excellent piece doing both cd control,mp3, and cd ripping. The new unit will apparantly work over the web. While not quite there I think this is the direction to go. Mp3 is great on the go music, but the quality is not good for me for regular listening. I have what I consider a high end system where I listen to individual discs and mp3 really falls down in that setting. I believe central storage is desirable and clearly the technology is there to distribute by virtue of a digital cable to mulitiple systems for good sound reproduction. One issue I have also found is that most systems lack the ability to deliver a digital cable to multiple systems without buying expensive add ons or gerry rigging other pieces. It would be great if the mfgrs. would provide a reasonable solution for this problem.

I'd love to see this sort of design become an audiophile mainstream reality. I'm not the best caretaker of CD's, and I place a very high value on storing them (uncompressed mind you) on a central server. Less chance I'll lose, scratch or misfile one of my 400+ CD's.

Also, I have to believe hard disk drives are ultimately a better transport mechanism. Hard disks have waaay high iops than CD's which ultimately has to be a benefit when spitting out a consistent stream of 1's and 0's. Also, HDD's are easily replaced when they wear out. By contrast when the drive motor in your CD player gets shot, God help you.

Has the problem just been mating them with a good DAC? I don't know. I'm just a layperson, but I'd imagine you'd want a very big solid state dynamic cache that spits out 1's and 0's at a steady pace. Would this be the DAC's job or the transport's job? The other potential limitation is jitter that I believe has never been dealt with in even the best separate DAC/Transport designs. I also think it would be mandatory that you be able to upload your music via 802.11.a or g. I know the Stereophile review of Linn's product remarked that it was a pain to actually get music into the server.

I also think it's worth segmenting your market into the purist, two-channel audiophile crowd. They won't go for this sort of design until it's very well established. Plus a lot of the two channel dorks (I'm one of them) don't seem to have very large music collections and won't get as excited about the value of a central server.

However there's also the networked home crowd. My understanding is this is becoming the much more lucrative market (installing wired houses or extensive home theaters) and those people are much more willing to experiment with such a design than the former group.

Good luck with your trials!

P.S. - I know of a HDD supplier who might be useful for this project. Contact me if you're interested.