Music Servers VS Excellent Transports?

ditto Walt and Bigamp. I buy cds, listen to them, then rip them. Most of them go to storage but I do keep a stash of around 50 cds handy. Because I do not encode in lossless, I do believe my transport sounds marginally better than my Sonos. Like others, I keep my transport for sacds but I really only keep it so I can listen to cds I just bought. Sometimes I am too lazy to rip them right away.

I use both and will continue to do so. Like Mark02131 stated, the biggest benefit for me of having a music server is the ability to easily enjoy my vast cd collection. Because of the size of collection, I do not encode in a lossles format but rather VBR 256 using the latest LAME codec. Even at these compressed rates, the sound compared to my cdp is very close. So what is my reason for having a separate transport? Sometimes I do not want to wait and rip a cd before listening to it. Perhaps I am old school, but I also still like the idea of holding the cd and reading the liner notes.

Remember that there are moving parts that you need to consider. The main one is the hard drive which you will use to store all your music. I use a 1 Terabyte NAS with a RAID backup system and enterprise level hard drives. If you are going to spend the time to rip and manage your music, you should seriously think about the mechanism in which you are going to store and backup your music.