new updates in transports or are they obsolete ?

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...

Audioengr- you will also not believe how great a Stello CDT200 sounds with Aberdeen Components mods that cost alot less any of your mods etc...

Audioengr can you provide links to any industry reviews which support your claims? The computer setup you are recommending is two to three times the cost of a decent used transport, and since we are talking about the transport level only here, improvements are going to be governed by the law of diminishing returns - a factor not to be ignored. No offense, but you do stand to gain from sales.

One thing I will say is that if I were to go this route, I don't think I would buy a boxed music server. The post by Gunbei about Tivo points to the kind of mess you can get yourself into with a closed box type of arrangement. Better off with a standard computer/laptop and external disc arrays, I would think.

Kana, is the Stello front loading? I am interested in a decent front loading transport. I am not intersted in anything that has to be modded, though. I'd rather just get something that is engineered and built to work and sound good.