Music from hard drive better than CD?

I'm still trying to figure out what to do here--I'm about 70% through ripping the 1000+ CDs in the Rock/Blues genre... I seriously encourage folks to think about standalone storage, since ultimately you will want to access your music from other places in your house besides the one PC they are resident on. Right now, I'm running three audiotrons and one CD30, as well as a USB audio device off my PC.

My latest thinking is something like this for storage:

http://store.niveusmedia.com/s.nl/sc.2/category.10/it.A/id.455/.f

I was originally going to go with a bunch of LaCie external USB 2.0 drives and a Linksys $90 NAS box, but I discovered, much to my chagrin, that the NAS box they have requires you to format the disks in a proprietary format. Doesn't work for me. I'm ripping the CDs to the LaCie drives, but I worry about their long term viability--these puppies run hot. Just don't think they are really designed for 24/7 operation.

The selling points of the Niveus server seem to be quiet (no fans), component-like aesthetics, and $ (Dell quoted me about $14K for 1.5TB of RAID5 storage. Unlike everyone else, I'm ripping the whole CD--I don't wanna go back and do this again.

I'm also intrigued by the Niveus PCs like the Denali HDTV; I've been leery of putting a computer in my rig until seeing their fanless ultraquiet numbers... But then, I also found this:

http://www.logicsupply.com/product_info.php/cPath/29/products_id/51

Trying to decide now whether I want to embark on the fullblown HTPC/Windows Media Center Edition or something to just serve up WAV files...

I knew there was a reason to wait on the server 'til after CES announcements... This puppy is due out in Feb. May not be as quiet as the Niveus, but at this price ($1K) it can live in the garage...

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail.php?productid=97&categoryid=19

Jmesarch-

You may want to look at the Roku Soundbridge products, the Slimp3, and the CD30. They are network audio devices, and I think they are all "server-push" so they will allow you to run multiple remotes off a single computer. Don't know whether they will permit multiple remotes to play the same exact music, however, since the network is running a point-to-point protocol. You might look into using the computer to create a stream like the netradio stations and using the remotes to access that if playing the same thing from multiple places is important. I think most of these things have digital outputs as well as analog. I suspect the analog outs are pretty suspect for audiophiles, but if you are just looking for ambient background music, probably works...

Dig around in the digital forums here. There is a bunch of info on folk's server based systems.

I was anything but an Apple fan--I've got four Win XP computers in the house and a NAS running Win Storage Server software--but still ended up hanging a Mac Mini on the stereo to do music duty. I looked at SFF PCs, but the cost to get to something in the same form factor as the mini was expensive. The Mac Mini is also pretty quiet, which is a factor to consider for us retentive audiophiles.

Pardales, my quick check of i-retailers indicates the Apogee mini-DAC will set you back about $1.2K. I use a Waveterminal U24 ($160). If you went that route, it would leave you a cool $1K to find a good DAC that could also be used for other things... $1K on the used market almost gives you a Theta Gen Va, for example, or a Birdland. I haven't A/B'd my Waveterminal/dCS set-up against the Apogee, but I still think the U24 route gives you more ultimate flexibility. The USB input of the U24 will let you put the device right next to the DAC and limit the length of your coax digital interconnect...

C'mon guys, Apple is better/worse than Win in *some* circumstances. For HT/audio use, I think the Mac fits great--I bought a mini. Relevant decisional included:

1. Form Factor. Apple wins on this count hands down. I'm not ashamed to have it in my living room. Most Win boxes are ugly and, while there are some competitive SFF PCs, you are pretty much stuck with rolling your own guts for those. That gets costly and requires some technical savvy I'd rather apply somewhere else.

2. Ambient Noise. The mini is quieter, hands down, than any Win box I've run. Yeah, you can invest in heat pipe technology for a Win box or try to upgrade components, but why? The Apple is perfect for this kind of duty. Yes, you could also go with a quieter laptop, but I have to believe (unmitigated opinion based on use of desktops and laptops for 20 years) the reliability of the mini is better than any Win or Apple laptop in the long run.

3. Screen size. Tongue in cheek. I've got a 61" pioneer elite plasma on the wall behind the stereo. Why do I need a display, whether it be laptop or otherwise. (Ever see the visualizer in HD?). I think a lot of folks attaching a PC to a stereo are in the same boat. The Apple has a DVI out, which makes the connection pretty simple. None of the four Win XP boxes in my house have DVI out and, while you can get a new video card, its an upgrade. DVI on the Apple is standard. Yeah, you can lose the monitor while ordering a Dell, but the "refund" you get really isn't commensurate.

Bluetooth on the Mac was a bonus--I can sit on my couch, surf the web on a large screen with a keyboard and mouse that don't cause a walking hazard. Very cool. Now, if someone will only make a really good Bluetooth trackball, I'll be all set.

What didn't count was the lack of coax digital out. I'm heavily biased in favor of USB audio output devices, and that works great with either the Mac or the Win. In the case of the Win boxes, I feel like I'm paying for something I'm not using, since they always seem to want to sell you some fancy schmantzy audio card that is blown out of the water by my Waveterminal U24.

Downstairs, on the other hand, my workhorse is a Win box. Compatibility with work computers is a bigger issue for my home office. So, I've upgraded some bits to keep it quieter, and it works just fine serving up audio to the stereo down there even while I'm photoshopping something or surfing the web.

I will note that the Win box seems to require a lot more fiddling whenever I install something. Apple is much more plug-n-play. I spend 10x more time troubleshooting network and device driver issues with the Win box than I do the Apple.

Jman66 - there are some computer music players that also treat "related" songs differently if tagged that way. For example, I believe I read that you can associate two songs with iTunes so that one will always follow the other and the normal gap that appears between songs will be skipped.

Nnyc - a four meter spdif coax run sounds loooong. Probably not as bad acoustically as the 30' toslink run I once had, however. That was what convinced me to go USB. I switched things up and ran a long USB run with repeaters and a short coax run and the world suddenly got vastly better...

Glad to hear you wrung some improvements out of the system. I'd be curious to hear the results of using the Squeezebox. I used to have a host of Audiotrons around my house run off my hardwired ethernet. I liked the search capabilities and the fact that the Audiotrons were autonomous and didn't require any software running on a server--each Audiotron indexes all available music files in public directories, maintains its own catalog, and pulls files down as needed. I gather the Slim devices require some server to "push" the data out to the Squeezebox.

The reasons the Audiotrons have fallen into disuse in my house are:

(i) Whenever there is a brownout or some kind of network fault, they have to reindex the songs, which can take a good 15 minutes with a large collection. Since the audiotrons were in areas I didn't use everyday, it seemed like they were reindexing every time I wanted to use them.

(ii) The indexing works great with mp3s, but tag implementation for .wav files is spotty and the only way of putting "tags" on your .wav files uses is manually using some audiostation software that isn't--in my book--reliable with large libraries. The tagging is also nonstandard, so the effort is audiotron specific. Ugh. While the Audiotron supports some other lossless compression schemes, I function in a mixed windows/OSx environment, and have to deal with the lowest common denominator between iTunes and Windows media players--right now that seems to be .wav.

Anyway, good luck with the Squeezebox. I think the SB won't suffer from (i), but I'd be curious what your experience with the software is related to (ii).