the best, cost-no-object, music streamer?


I am currently using McIntosh MCD500 as source. I love it so much that my CD collection is piling up. Now i find it more hassle to find CD, play it, and return it to cabinet blah blah blah.

I think one solution to this is to find a (very) good music streamer connected to a HDD or whatever.

Can any of you share what is the best, cost-no-object, music streamer? And why do you like them?

Am no techie, but seems ability to play 24/192, FLAC, apple app compatibility is a must.

Thanks for looking.
adg243
Adj243 - while you are in the planning stages consider hard drive failure!

This just happened to me and reloading my CD's was a pita.

I now have all my music on a NAS drive that has dual drives in a RAID mirrored configuration. If one of the drives fail I simply replace it and the NAS drive software takes care of copying the data to the new drive automatically.

If you start downloading music then hard disk failures can have a bigger impact

I know hard drive failures are rare these days, but you only need it to happen once to really tick you off.
Adj243 - while you are in the planning stages consider hard drive failure!

This just happened to me and reloading my CD's was a pita.

I now have all my music on a NAS drive that has dual drives in a RAID mirrored configuration. If one of the drives fail I simply replace it and the NAS drive software takes care of copying the data to the new drive automatically.

If you start downloading music then hard disk failures can have a bigger impact

I know hard drive failures are rare these days, but you only need it to happen once to really tick you off.
Thank you williewonka. One way I hedge against this is by having copies of the hard drive through the amazingly fast thunderbolt connection
I really think this technology is so changing that what is said here is obsolete immediately. I have sacds in dsd on my hard drive that I can merely click on using my Ipad and have played in Itunes. Listening to sacds on a universal player is quite deficient in comparison. Soon I will have a dsd capable dac, which I long to hear. Already the sacds in dsd are superior to 192/24 HD.

Yes, all of this is consuming lots of space, but I have hot removable 2 Tb hard drives in a raid system with four drives that are upgraded when I add new files. I am soon to place one of these in my safety deposit box and monthly update it.