Last year I decided to replace playing CDs with storing them on a hard drive and playing them through a server connected to my vintage MSB Platinum DAC. The salesman persuaded me to get a Bluesound Vault 2i which copse CDs to its hard drive and corrects detectable bit errors in part by reading a CD more than once. I ran onto some difficulties which included extreme complication whenever I added a new CD or download and the impossibility of listing each piece of music by its composer. With help I got a copy of the library stored in the Vault 2i onto a folder in my laptop. My complete entire collection took up a little more than 30 gB, something that could easily fit a 50 gB flash drive. I made a separate folder for each composer and I use the flash drive rather than the hard drive. The Vault 2i can get near HD for any classical music station though for four classical music stations when the weather is right I still use an FM tuner for the better resolution than HD has to offer.
I suspect there might have been a cheaper way to do this but I do not think far more expensive servers have anything better.
On the subject of rationalization dismissing extremely costly components I have some skepticism. Cables costing 5 figures advertise such expedients as litz or ribbon construction to ameliorate skin effect at high frequencies. If you calculate the effective loss of cross sectional ares of an 8 gauge speaker wire in series with a 4 Ohm speaker, the difference is only a few hundredths of an Ohm resistance increase at 20 kHz over DC resistance, which could cause a few hundredths of a dB attenuation at frequencies we can't hear. This the junk science used to sell such speakers does not get you what you pay for. How do we know what other deceptions might be in the audio industry.
There is another reason I take extreme prices with a grain of salt. There is a $350,000 pair of monoblocks which can be built for approximately $2000. I do not know whether the $350,000 model even uses polypropylene filter capacitors in the high voltage power supplies instead of the inferior electrolytic kind you see in "high end" amplifiers costing $20,000 or more. This is why I design and build my own amplifiers.
I suspect there might have been a cheaper way to do this but I do not think far more expensive servers have anything better.
On the subject of rationalization dismissing extremely costly components I have some skepticism. Cables costing 5 figures advertise such expedients as litz or ribbon construction to ameliorate skin effect at high frequencies. If you calculate the effective loss of cross sectional ares of an 8 gauge speaker wire in series with a 4 Ohm speaker, the difference is only a few hundredths of an Ohm resistance increase at 20 kHz over DC resistance, which could cause a few hundredths of a dB attenuation at frequencies we can't hear. This the junk science used to sell such speakers does not get you what you pay for. How do we know what other deceptions might be in the audio industry.
There is another reason I take extreme prices with a grain of salt. There is a $350,000 pair of monoblocks which can be built for approximately $2000. I do not know whether the $350,000 model even uses polypropylene filter capacitors in the high voltage power supplies instead of the inferior electrolytic kind you see in "high end" amplifiers costing $20,000 or more. This is why I design and build my own amplifiers.
