Hi Alex,
Yes we have certainly discussed it. Here is an email I recieved from one of my dealers with an interesting perspective on this. It has been edited to prevent any negativity towards current products on the market.
Hi James,
Product of the future is a streamer, not a server.
Here's the deal. You own a computer at home for your family stuff. You have Itunes for your music. You have your computer properly backed up. You have lots of memory. You have Wifi spewing around your house. The above is the typical customer. Now, you load your CDs into your computer- into your Itunes at lossless WAV file.
Now you're ready for the streamer. Set it up with some computereze and, your computer sends- in wireless (or wired if you prefer) all the music on your computer to this streamer. It has a read-out on the front - for accessing the music. All it is doing is accessing the music an streaming it to a quality DAC.
There are so many computer users out there TODAY, right now, loading all their music onto their computers. They borrow CDs from their friends and the library. They load zillions to their computer. Now they want to access them. Most of these guys use a crappy system to throw them around the house like a KKKKKK (digital out- so you can play it through your surround receiver!) or MMMMMMM- built in crappy DAC.
This customer profile is NOT going to buy a high end CD player because they are using their computer as the server. They think of CD players as yesterday's news. The just aren't going down the CD player path.
Servers store the music on internal computers. So every time they hiccup or break, the data needs to be reloaded and it's absolutely 911. I have sold servers from xxxxxxx and yyyyyyyy. They all eventually break and the customer is pissed- all that time and effort loading discs has to be done again. Even in the best of circumstances these servers have drop outs and farts. Don't go there.
The vvvvvvvv products are streamers. But they don't use Itunes- the world standard for categorizing music!. Make no mistake, Itunes runs the world.
I mention this cuz I'm not a computer guy. I don't mind getting up to play CDs. But I talk to customers every day and see this is what they're doing with their music.
James
I agree with this assessment, somewhat. I wouldn't likely buy a hard-disk based player as well, for the very reasons cited above. However, I do store my music on my computer. Well, I actually store it on a 1 terrabyte external hard drive that has USD & Firewire connectivity. You can pick up a 1 terrabyte drive of great quality for less than $300 these days. So, if I store all 1,200 of my CDs (and that's uncompressed PCM files) I can simply buy another drive to back up my entire collection for pennies per album.
As alluded to in another thread, I'm not an iTunes guy. I still buy CDs and rip them to my computer and keep the CD as a non-valotile backup, if needed. I will never use iTunes as long as I can avoid it. I tried it as a way to manage my music library (Squeezebox has that option), but didn't like it at all. So, as long as CDs still exist, I will buy them, rip them and store them.
I have been using a streamer for almost 6 months now and have never had a dropout. Using the SP1.7 as a DAC, I can't tell the difference between CDs and the streamer.
So I guess where I would diverge from your dealers perspective is that as I also see 'music servers' with internal drives as a no-no, the advent of high-quality mega-storage USD external drives for great prices still makes the hard disk as a great alternative for the future. Even if I get away from the streamer, there are products eeking into the market now that a basically a CD transport that has USB imputs. You can use the CD transport to feed an external DAC (like the BDA-1, which is why I see it as great) or it will accomodate USB hard drives (which are also fed to the external DAC) and the CD transport in the unit allows the CDs in your collection to be ripped to the external hard drives.
I see nothing wrong with having a standalone CD player, but I see my future having both a CD player and a mass storage device using external storage of some type.
Keith