Recommendation on hard driver based CD player

Thanks all you responding!

My problems with PCs or Macs are:
1. I don't want to turn on the computer with fans in
2. Sound quality. As Ckorody said, LOL.

BTW, I tried ML390S DAC with SPDIF-out of my LOW-END Aopen Yamaha 744 sound card. Not good...

I will try to survey on Cambridge gear. Any other suggestions? VRS and Olive seems not my options.

Dream... I think its a gross conceptual error to assume that the sound quality coming out of VRS/Olive pre-built gear will be any different than a PC configured properly.

I use a Serener EPIA small form factor PC. Its fanless and with a NEC Spinpoint drive, probably the most quiet drives around. It outputs to a USB audio device. I haven't found any onboard/card options that sound as good--although I have not tried some of the very high end cards like the RMEs that will support external word clocks.

You also should make sure the software you are running isn't causing problems. Search on asio and kmixer--you want to bypass the PC sound processors or it will screw everything up audibly.

I don't like proprietary solutions like Cambridge because I have no idea what its using to rip, what its using to encode, and what its using to playback. I know EAC is the best bit-for-bit ripper on the planet. Its free. I know that the ALAC system I use is lossless. I can move my files and have some future-proofing of my investment in time that resulted in the files. I can edit my tags and clean them up the way that *I* like them. I haven't seen any standalone devices that look like they meet those criteria.

I'm new to this computer based music concept. How do you connect a fanless pc with usb, ethernet, etc. outputs to a dac for conversion?

For a home built music server, please see http://alumni.cse.ucsc.edu/~sherman/#musicserver.

Sherman built his own hard drive based music server and includes the details on his web page listed above. cheers..