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Hard drive storage still need good cd player?

Starting moving my CD's to my media center PC. I connected the PC via digital optic to my external DAT converter (proceed) and the sound is pretty good. I haven't done serious listening, I just did this for the convieniance and ability to have music playing without having to change CD, when doing chores or have company over type of thing.

So while I'm recording this to the HD, I started woundering, what is the difference with having the music stored on the HD compared to the cd it came on..? The CD is just a transport with a laser pickup that reads bits and bytes and sends it to the dac as accurately as possible. So if you where able to get a great copy of a cd onto a hard drive, and pump that to the DAC you don't need a 5K cd player. One step forward, and what if I could simply buy the music already copied with the best equipment possible directly to a file I could download.

For reference, I'm using a classe cd/dvd player with proceed avp, classe cam 200 mono blocks and bw 802 speakers.

Michel
michel_findlay

Showing 1 response by tboooe

tboooe's avatar
tboooe
1,009 posts
 
I have both. For me, I have over 40K songs so for the sake of hard drive space I rip at 256 VBR to MP3 format. For critical listening I use my cdp. I am able to discern a loss in soundstaging and imaging with my digital music. Things sound compressed (duh!) with a loss of dynamics. But I am happy to make the trade off for convenience of quickly accessing my music.

I suppose if you are ripping to FLAC or some other lossless format then all you would need is a really nice DAC.
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