Music Servers VS Excellent Transports?

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

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.

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