If hard drive betters optical digital retrieval

The new $24k Boulder basically does this, but it uses a memory buffer, not a hard drive.

I expect to see more of this type of thing as solid state storage matures.

MacIntosh made a beast of what you are talking about, it has a 750 GB HD but is like 5K. It may beat a computer but is not worth the sound difference.

I wonder how many memory players have been sold.

How about a Squeezebox...Thats all I have used for the last three years..I don't even own a cdp anymore.

Memory Player fits your question exactly -- still seems to be hard to get though.

Bosrt is correct.

Flash memory was never intended to be as fast or reliable as a regular hard drive. Of course, no one envisioned the uses - such as long term storage - that it is used for today. I'll definitely wait and see on this one.

Laptop Flash Drives Hit by High Failure Rates

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,143558-c,memory/article.html

"Don't be the first onto the ice, and of course, not the last off."

Soon enough this will be forgotten as reliability betters and size increases.

Actually some people did have things just like this at CES, including I thing Boulder and someone in the middle level too.

Meridian has always used DVD-ROM drives to allow high speed scans to counteract miss-reads.

Old news, the real deal is to slot a 64 gig (or bigger !) flash drive (i.e: no moving parts) into your PC of choice with a suberb usb dac, ala one of Gordon Rankins @ :

http://www.usbdacs.com/

or from the likes of

UltraFi- iRoc, Benchmark- DAC1 Pre, PS Audio's LinkDac, & VAC's new USB Dac offering...

A flash drive equipped PC connected to one of the above is currently the "killer app" of audio media hubs in my opinion, and in many instances can totally "dust" a megabuck silver disk based front end...!

With an Apple laptop or MacMini and iPhone or iPod Touch for example, you can have full wireless remote control of your entire library with a comprehensive graphical interface which is light years ahead of any of the current competition in this rapidly evolving sector..and being software based can be updated virtually cost free and easily without alteration to your lossless ripped source library.

All the above can still cost less than a premium hardware device, most of which thus far, poorly attempt to combine half the above features in a proprietary manner...just my 50 cents worth !

HELLO, hard drives as we know them today will be extinct just as all other computer hardware has become. The future of hard drives is solid state

Wow very interesting about Olive. I know that PS Audio has something like this in the works. I think this is the future of digital playback.

It's called an Olive. It actually goes one better. It stores the CD onto an internal hard-drive. Next time you play the "CD" you don't have to burn it again. Its already on the hard-drive.

Here's a like to a mod'd one available now on AudiogoN:

http://cls.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/cls.pl?dgtlplay&1210721571

Here's a link to the olive site:

http://www.olive.us/home.html

Enjoy,

TIC

It's called a Mac Mini - you press import under itunes and play back the CD after 2-3 minutes from the hard drive. And the best thing - you only have to do it once. Why the need to have a CDP - a small PC is much more convenient and flexible for the center of the media system.

Joke aside - it you want the full CD read with error correction into a harddrive that take some time. It would be not very practical for a CDP.

Why, when you can just use a computer?

That being said, I think PS Audio has something in the works that does that.

Yamaha had such a product. The Alesis Masterdisk also work in that way.

Nah, if you are going to do something like this, it would be better to just transfer the CD info to a flash memory and play it out of there. No spinning discs at all after the data is fully retrieved. Or a small buffering delay if you want to just start playing.