Mac Laptop & Sound Cards

Ckorody - i have approx 1500 cd's, 20 sacd's, and hundreds of albums. i use the mini for my browsing the net, for work, and it is also used as a music and file server for the other macs in the house. all the macs backup there disks to the multiple 500gb drives attached to the mini.
i work out of my home so i have a decent audio setup in my den: dk design, sony dvp9000es, nikko fm tuner, an adcom gda-700 dac (just purchased tonight), totem speakers, definitive technology sub, and an airport express which is hooked up to the adcom dac. the sony is also hooked up to the dac.
i have a dedicated audio room that has all classe gear with totem mani 2 speakers.

the 500gb drives are hooked up by firewire. i have been looking to purchase a NAS multi-terabyte storage system that will allow me to use raid 10 or raid 5. there was a unit on ebay that just went for $600 for a 2 terabyte unit. if i buy this NAS unit, i can hook this up in a closet with a network connection and i can get rid of all the 500gb drives i have on my desk.
btw: the adcom dac really cleaned up the sound that was coming out of the airport express. smooth, and had to turn the subwoofer down a bit, the bass was more there.

Hi RB -

I figured you must have more going on then just the CDs - I have 1,500+ in Apple Lossless on one 400Gb and one back-up.

Do you have your LPs ripped as well? How big is a file? I am not a vinyl guy (have to practice self control somewhere) so I have not had the chance to play with that.

FWIW I have been much, much happier since I left Firewire for SATA. Beyond it being faster - which is nice when cloning or backing up (obviously not a playback issue) it is so much more robust. Doesn't care how its shut down or started up etc. The new 32Mb cache drives rock. I cloned my whole music drive (375Gbs) in less then 2 hours.

Still I am with you, a NAS would be great - especially to get the noise out of the room.

Excellent thread!

I'm using my Apple PowerBook G4 as transport feeding wirelessly an Apple Airport Express connected by minijack to RCA on my Denon AVR 3805 surround amp. I'm looking at using the Toslink connection for sound quality improvement

I have a question regarding preferences on iTunes: under Playback, is it better to have the option 'sound equalizer' ON (not sure about the exact English wording, I'm using French version of the soft, anyway it's the third one from the top)?

Thanks for your help

best to have everything off except for "error correction on" on the Advanced/Importing page

Let me add an additional consideration. I have four Macs, with this 1.67 GHz PowerPC G4 with only 1 GB of memory being the most current. A friend uses a HT with two 750 GB drives, one as backup and uses MS music player software to get a AES/EBU into his dac. Can I use a Mac instead of this PC stuff? Could I store the music on the external hard-drives and control with my Mac? Would it not be the case that Apple Lossless would be the equal of AIFF he uses?