On an earlier question: I'm not planning a primer on the "PC music" concept since I'm way too green behind the ears on the subject yet. Once I feel solid, I might but at present, I'm a "reluctant late not-quite-yet adopter" so I'm far more liable to spread rumors, misconceptions and plain bad intel than anything useful. We have many overseas readers who rely on our writing. If they extrapolate from my areas of competence where I do have experience to this where I don't, they'd be misguided by taking my word for it. I wouldn't do that to them. That's why my MO always is, be honest about what you don't know. That doesn't mean you can't write about it - after all, you gotta get your feet wet at some point to learn something new. Simply present the facts (I'm new, this is what I suspect, this is what I'm worried about it, this is what I don't understand). Readers in my shoes can accompany me on my discoveries, readers well ahead can hit "next" or be amused by why what I don't know. And, quite often, the nice ones will e-mail me and share their knowledge to help me along.
It's been working well thus far and this thread is intentioned along the same line. What I will do as it stands right now is this:
I have on-hand things like the Raysonic CD-168, AMR CD-77, Ancient Audio Lektor Prime, Zanden 5000 combo and RWA-modified Olive Symphony. That gives me a variety of one- and two-box RedBook machines that also all work as transports, with the Olive even wireless. Neal is sending his MusicVault which will stand in as a hard-drive server to do the wireless HD tango.
There's a variety of permutations to assess raw performance in the listening seat. How close does the Transporter come as a raw DAC when fed from a traditional spinner with a good digital interconnect (Stealth Sextet) to my traditional CDPs? Then, how does the Transport compare when streaming files from an Olive server, NAS server or laptop sending wireless FLAC or WAV files?
That should establish a ranking of audio quality.
In parallel, I'll have to investigate the "data acquisition" part. How does how you import the data to hard-drive effect the final outcome, and does what file format you send to the transporter make a difference and if so, which format sounds best. So there's the grabbing part and the streaming part and the spinning part.
Then there's the whole convenience angle.
If you've got 2000 CDs but only listen to 100 of them and streaming/serving suddenly has you rediscover all 2000 of 'em, isn't that worth far more than a potential 3% reduction of "raw resolution"?
As further feedback arrives on this thread, I might get more ideas on what else to write about. Some of it might require a separate article to not make this review too endless. Intel is good but too much of it in one article becomes overload city.
