new updates in transports or are they obsolete ?

Sorry,

Baddabob- If you're in the market for a transport take a look at:

Stello CDT200 (Aberdeen Components has an excellent mod for
this unit)

LyngdorfAudio CD-1(does upsampling)

A PC alternative would be the new Cambridge Audio
Azur 640H music server

Steve,

I was wondering if hard drive fragmentation has ever been an issue with your set up.

I'd imagine the odds would be much lower for this happening on a system designed just for music playback versus a computer system that's constantly writing, erasing, copying and rewriting data over and over again until the files become stored in non-contiguous segments.

But even if it does get fragmented, it would be easy to repair. I was just curious if you were ever listening to Sarah Vaughn and she suddenly started going Porky Pig on you.

Dean

If you were setting up a hard drive system you should use dedicated hard drives for the music file storage. You'd start with a clean drive and fill it up by ripping CDs one at a time. Under this scenario fragmentation would never become an issue. Even if you didn't have a dedicated music storage drive playing back two channels of red book quality audio is a fairly trivial task for any 7,200 rpm hard drive. Fragmentation just isn't a real world issue for consumer type audio playback.

Onhwy61,

I asked this same question regarding iPods over a year ago. I guess I have difficulty letting speeding snails lie. I've never experienced what I would consider a fragmentation related issue with my iPod. The batteries on the other hand suck major donkey dork.

However, the hard drive of my Tivo unit is in serious need of deep digital colon cleanse. The older it gets the more skipping, pixelization and drop-outs occur. I think it's time to just replace the the damn drive. I'd imagine all the recording and erasing going on with this unit would exceed anything a hard drive based music system would experience. Plus if a hard drive system sounds better it's a no brainer.

A good hard-drive system can run the range from <$2K to over $4K. For under $2K you can have an Off-Ramp Turbo with a stock new Benchmark DAC-1. You will not believe how great this sounds. If you have to have the very best (the additional improvements get smaller and smaller as you spend more, but this is where the magic is), then $4K is more like it. Battery power for the Off-Ramp, mods etc...