Music Server vs. PC vs. Transport vs. ?

i mentioned in another thread that macbooks or laptops would not be good for a music server. the reason is they get hot and heat will promote an early death for the computer. after using your macbook for a while, feel the bottom. mine gets very hot and so do my friends. now take a mac mini or macpro and do the same thing. very cool, i have my mini on top of a 500gb drive that fits under the mini and it runs cool.
a nas is the way to go but you still need a good backup in case the nas fails. i have 2 friends both in the IT trade and they both lost thousands of $$$$ when their nas failed and they lost all the data on the nas. 1 friend had over $3000 of purchased apple music that was lost and the other friend had over 1000 cd's ripped to his nas and the he gave away all his cd's and the unit failed.
my setup in my den contains: totem speakers, definitive technology supercube sub, sony 9000es dvd/cd/sacd, nikko fm tuner, dk design vs-1, adcom gda-700 dac, audio alchemy dti, mac mini, and airport express. i have both the dvp9000es and the airport express hooked up to the dti to cleanup the jitter, and from the dti to the dac.
i have other rooms with airport express unit hooked up to receivers in those rooms. i have my macbook control the mac mini running itunes from the other parts of the house. i'm purchasing an ipod touch that will also allow me to control the mac mini running itunes from anywhere in the house.

Rbstehno,

Back up drives are cheap for your music library. As for hard drives failing, the one thing that you can be certain of is that they all fail and this can happen at any time.

As for the iPod Touch, I love mine using RemoteBuddy.

Deshapiro, I will be at CES and would love to hear the purpose built PC demo that your dealer will be doing with Rockport. What is your dealer's name and do you know what hotel/room they will be in?

Deshapiro, I also wanted to follow-up with you on why your enthusiasm waned on the wavelength audio Crimson USB DAC solution that you put into your system. If memory serves me correct, you went the distance with Alex at Aplhifi explaining how good this setup sounded in the "Game Over" thread? If I am confusing your with someone else, please disregard this question.

Hi All,
I am still very enthusiastic about the concept. As I also posted, in my system the Crimson simply didn´t have enough bass dynamics. I´m talking about the grunt that you feel with a drum thwack, not flabby, boomy bass. I auditioned the AMR CD player, and found that it provided the bass kick, but that it wasn´t as good as the Crimson in other respects, imaging, staging, tonality, etc. I´m currently using a USB DAC called the iroc which seems to be a good compromise between the Crimcson and the AMR. My dealer is Ron Lapporte at Ultimate Audio, and he will be exhibitng with Rockport and Purist. As with all things, YMMV.

David