I too am a fan of hard drive based music, the convenience of having most of your CD collection at your fingertips (depending on the size of your hard drive of course
) frees up your music and consequently I find my listening repertoire has become more adventurous when using my computer based system.
The idea of hard drive based transport having higher sound quality has some very good reasoning behind it, hard drives have a larger buffer and are less prone to errors than their optical counterparts.
I personally prefer wireless options over cable based devices for the simple reason that you don't have to have your PC in the same room connected via a long cable, my computer although reasonably quiet still has some fan noise and puts out a fair amount of heat.
Now at last I come to the point
how would a hard drive based system perform if the hard drive was freed from it’s noisy computer bound environment and put into a high end CD player with a cd-r drive that allowed you to rip your CD's directly onto a very large hard drive? Well such an option does exist:
http://www.zerooneaudio.com/products.htm The few reviews I've read seem to agree that the superiority of the hard drive over CD is pretty enormous. As far as I'm aware these are the only 'high end' machines that have a hard drive inside their players, which begs the question if the hard drive based players are so superior why aren't more of the mainstream hi fi mfs doing it as well? Surely they risk having PC and other companies who make peripheral USB and streaming devices take a huge bite out of the market for front end digital components.
There are still a lot of high end CD Players on the market and more being brought out all the time, even allowing for the fact that not everybody who loves good quality audio and owns a computer wants to get involved with the complexities of a computer based audio system, I still would have thought that more high end CD players would be starting to incorporate hard drives in with their CD players, most people these days can use a DVD recorder using a hard drive so a CD player with a hard drive should present few problems.
With the cost of even the large hard drives going down all the time I don’t think that the cost of implementing one in a CD player would drive up the cost beyond the reach of most people.
Surely this third way for digital playback is a good idea, even if you have a computer and are happy with using it as your main transport it still means you have to leave your PC on all the time just so you can listen to music when the mood strikes you without having to go into another room boot up your PC and open up the music playing programme ect ect ect.
Personally I’m quite happy using my computer as part of my system but occasionally I wish I could still have the convenience of my PC based system without having to boot up the computer.
Just a thought
