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Future of CD's - Hard drive based music

The big change/future I have found is the use of all digital music - I havent used my CD player since christmas - I got a Mac Mini and ripped all my CDs to the harddrive lossless formated and got a decent DAC - I Ripped only the songs I liked and I now have over 4 days worth of music I enjoy - no more getting up changing CD's,I can instantly play any song from my entire library of favorites. I use my Sony Hi-def TV as the monitor so I can web browse while listening to music. The sound quality is as good as CD's as far as I can tell - I wonder how long it will be before lossless songs are offered online - this will completely kill the need for CD's for me.
thymanst
kublakhan
717 posts
 
Rbischoff, i have a Benchmark dac1 with some empirical audio mods including the I2S mod. I have an Empirical Audio off ramp I2S between my computer and the Benchmark dac. I'm now mainly listening to headphones and have a bunch of different amps and cans and can say for certain that the music has all the depth and texture i expect from a first class system - nothing at all like you would think from a computer system. made a believer out of me.
jrun
61 posts
 
Sorry guys, I'm not ready to trust any harddrive as my only musical source. Your harddrive will fail. Not if, when. Now there is the backup consideration. How often, how many. Storage solutions are not a mature technology. Remember the Jazz drive? If you only download music and you have a catastrophic equipment failure you will lose your entire music collection. I for one am not even close to only using downloads and harddrives as my musical source.
gibson58
32 posts
 
don't get me wrong, I love my ipod as the most convenient music-on-the-go source. I doubt i'll ever get rid of or stop buying cds though for several reasons: listening to them in the car, sound quality, and i like browsing for them at the store and discovering new music. Also, I agree with others that there is something to be said about holding the jacket in hand to see what the artist had in mind for the presentation of their music. Hard drive based music is just another alternative option for getting the music to my ear.
pardales
652 posts
 
Jrun & Gibson58: Hard-drives are not new technology, and today they are inexpensive and getting more so -- they are also easy to configure for reliabity and security (RAID arrays and the like) . Computers are hardly new either (older than CD players I believe).

iPods can be used in car audio systems very easily and AUX jacks are becoming standard in cars.

No one is saying you have to sell your CD's. I can understand the discomfort, it is more an issue of comfort and how you like to interact with your music. Since I made the change I have listened to more parts my collection than ever, and been buying more music, worrying less about the gear.
don_s
271 posts
 
Jaybo, To add to what you said--Many times those who just download one song from a CD miss some real jems. I recently bought a CD (the actual physical disc) because one song grabbed me. Then I discovered another song on the CD that I liked even more after hearing it on my system and I have grown fond of the entire disc.

I copied the disc to my music server and safely stored the disc because I plan to live for a long time and expect to need it again.
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