Music from hard drive better than CD?

It is also important to note that getting music from a cd onto a harddisk is non-trivial due to the vaguaries of the redbook format, so some quality will be dependent on the copy. There is more information about this at EAC (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) which seems to do the best job so far, and here's a good thread about both this and the squeezebox:

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?icomp&1082299211

Sorry, I just noticed that EAC has already been mentioned here.
I believe there are 2 main issues that effect the quality of audio from a hard drive, which are 1) creating an accurate copy of the source material onto the hard drive and 2) accurately transporting the data off of the hard disk to a DAC. I think that if these are optimized, it is possible to beat any cd transport.
I have been using a 4 meter run of coax SPIDF from a computer into a Meridian 518 with shorten and flac files created from EAC copies and sound quality is excellent, though I think the length of the cable is a drawback. A 1 meter AES/EBU from a Meridian transport is still better, but I think if all things were equal, the hard drive would win.

Jman66 - rip each track individually and play it back through foobar2000 or some other player without any pause between tracks. This is the normal way it is done in foobar. Foobar also allows you to crossfade the tracks if you so desire.

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...

>>Rsbeck: Do you run the Apogee mini Dac into a pre-amp or straing into a set of powered monitors?<<

I run it straight into powered monitors. There is no need for a pre-amp. This is one of the things I like about this set-up. The Apogee Mini-Dac has balanced outs and my powered monitors have balanced inputs. You go from computer to Dac to powered speakers -- very short path, lots of efficiencies, you eliminate the cables between amplifier and speakers, don't have to run the signal through a pre-amp, and it sounds great.

>>Can it be run into a preamp (like any DAC)? Thanks<<

It can be run into a pre-amp or you can go straight from the Apogee to your amplifier. The Apogee has a volume control and balanced outs.

Thanks Edesilva, I had always assumed that there was a significant drawback to the long digital coax, even going into the "jitter buster" Meridian 518, so I replaced the long coax with an equally long USB cable attached to an M-Audio Audiophile USB box and a 1m digital coax into the 518. This setup sounds significantly better, and it is now comparable to the Meridian transport, but not quite there yet.

I'm thinking of trying the hardwired version of the slimdevices squeezebox to see if that makes an improvement. It is certainly a more flexible, user-friendly, device and having my entire music collection available at the press of a remote button is enticing.

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).

I use the slim server software, which you can get and run on it's own, and it works well. It can stream most any format of music (shorten, flac, wav etc) over the internet (you'll need a fat upstream pipe), handles 100,000+ songs no problem, and is fairly easy to use on multiple platforms (pure perl). You can also administer a whole collection over the web, and access your music from anywhere on the internet (works great on a lan).
It is a great piece of Open Source software regardless of whether you buy the hardware, and this is part of my motivation to get the hardware [shameless plug for Open Source].

http://slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html

Well, I finally got my music server together and I am very impressed with the sound. I am using a G4 laptop, a Lacie hard drive, and a Waveterminal U24. Music off of the hard drive sounds excellent, and I LOVE having my music accessible via iTunes.

That's the beauty of a hard drive based system. Vastly greater convenience with ready access to your entire music collection without any penalty in sound quality. It worthwhile to take the time to use the rating, comment, composer and grouping fields to organize your music into playlist.

Let me preface this with just how ignorant I am with regard to most of this technoogy. I am challanged by the idea that a highly frictionaly induced, magnetic, vulnerable, hard drive system can be superior to a minimally frictionaly induced, optical, secure CD system. Re: Mac vs. Windows, for better or worse (and I think potentionaly better) convergence of audio and video is comming. In this regard I think Apple has way to go before they catch up with Windows XP Media Center 2005.

My computer using aes/ebu playing .wav files on winamp sounds as good or better than my Modwright Sony 999es using spdif or even RCA on bypass.

Exact Audio Copy is very good. So is Foobar.

I use the CDP to preview CD's or to play when I don't feel like letting the computer take time "booting up". I noticed that I do not need warm up time like I do with the Sony using RCA on bypass.

Not sure how to explain it but my new computer set-up does sound qualitatively better than my McIntosh MCD 205 changer (which IS saying something). I'm sure many dedicated cdp's would sound better.