Recommendation on hard driver based CD player

If you don't go with the Mac as gently suggested, check out these to companies:

http://www.olive.us/p_bin/?cid=home

-or-

http://www.vrsaudiosystems.com/

I don't get the "since you appreciate engineering." How do you know that?

I made a leaping assumption that anyone who would spring $6,700 for Levinson gear - and make a point of telling us about it - was going to be buying an engineering driven solution - after all their cases aren't what those units are known for...

Then again, there is that word assumption LOL

Ok, good point...LOL.

BTW, Dream, here is the 2nd company I meant to, but did not paste into previous posting:

http://www.vrsaudiosystems.com/

Cambridge Audio 640H, allows you to daisy chain other units, outboard USB hard drives and other computers, my brother and I play files from our units over the internet across state lines without having to download!.

Your 39 has a digital input? the 640H makes a nice transport, I use my surround processors and Bel Canto DAC 2 for playback. $1,499 not too bad a price considering what others cost. It makes a nice user interface for a computer server.

the thing with these units for the moment is that many of them are trying to play the closed system game - can't expand the storage the comes with the system being the main example I've seen.

For those of you who don't spend a lot of time thinking about Intel in Apples, Open Source on Wall Street and the world being wired - i.e. looking at the broader landscape of computing, closed systems are a dead-end strategy; both for the manufacturer and anyone who buys in and wants to store more content then the manufacturer in their infinite wisdom made allowances for.