Music Servers VS Excellent Transports?

Essentialaudio - If you will be at CES or THE Show next month, I'll challenge you to a shootout. Bring your best Transport and then we will see...

St. Tropez suite 1203

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Can you please name a few integrated pieces that comes to your mind, thanks. I am very curious because there as some pretty nice one box units right now so....

In a number of cases a computer based system may be preferred, however a top notch transport or all in one player can beat it hands down.

Interesting enough, but many have gone this way for convenience more than anything, its a little sad since thats why we actually lost LP's (well not quite yet). Glad to know that actually do sound great and not degredation on performance, I am never going to use my PC as a source, just the whole idea, looking for a well made Music Server hopefuly from someone reputabale from the High End boys...Olive is on the list, but Chord / Mac and a couple of the other big boys are doing it so I will wait a little while and get one for sure....I am pleased with the Olive I have for now, actually very pleased, thanks and keep them coming.

I had an Squeezebox2 and a highly modded SB2, my Musichall CD player beat it as a transport by a small margin, my Forsell transport is in a whole other league, dont fall for the hype I did and I lost money a listening time, dont get me wrong I think the Squeezebox is a great product. Accessibility of music is wonderful, it is such a good commercial product that it competes with the lower tier of high end...I laugh when someone says it beats any transport out there and the only transport they have listened to is a DVD player!
The DAC seccion is unlistenable...

I do believe the future of digital is with servers, I am not sure we are there yet. When a computer server clearly beats my Forsell I will buy it.

I own the Olive Musica and think it is as good or better than any transport I have owned but I have not owned the upper echelon of players/transports. I run mine thru a Benchmark DAC and love it because I actually listen to music way more often due to it's convenience.

The simplest and least expensive way to get superb audio quality as well as great user interface - use your own computer, but add external boxes to get WiFi or networked interface and then reclock to get excellent sound quality.

First, decide on the interface you like. Most like iTunes best. Apple is the leader in this industry afterall. The problem is there is only S/PDIF wired or AirPort Express WiFi. Both have poor digital audio quality - lots of jitter. To solve this, add a Pace-Car reclocker.

Then you need a really good DAC. The lowest jitter solutions have I2S interface, such as the Northstar 192 DAC.

If you decide to go the USB route, then the bargain of the century is the DAC-1 USB. Sound quality is good, and can be improved with some mods. USB has the wire of course, but will allow you to use virtually any player software. I woudl avoid iTunes unless you use a MAC.

Forget about sound-cards and silent PC's. This is old technology. Now we have Sonos, Squeezebox, AirPort Express, Off-Ramp and DAC-1 USB.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

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.

There was a great article in The Absolute Sound that said that disk drive based music servers sounded better, go ahead and read it. For me the music server has opened up my music collection. Now I hear a lot more of my collection than I ever did with a transport. I would not even use a music server but a MAC/computer based server because as formats change and grow you will be able to grow with it.

Good Luck and enjoy the music !!
Mark