PC-Audio vs. High-end CD Player-GAME OVER

Hatari-USB is limited to around 15 feet, but you can buy extenders that allow longer cables. I use an Opticis 30 meter fiber optic USB cable that converts USB to fiber optic and back again with no degredation in the signal. That way, I can keep the loud PC out of the room.

Personally, I use a 500 GB drive to hold ripped CDs and back it all up to another 500 GB drive in case of a drive failure. The drives are internal drives. Number/size/external/internal is up to you.

After the CDs are ripped to hard drive, there is no need to play them from a CD drive. The music software, like iTunes, reads the album from hard disk (or memory if you load the album into a ramdisk). So, internal/external CD drive is irrelevant in my opinion. CD drive heat during ripping shouldn't be an issue.

If someone brings over a CD to play, I recommend ripping it first to avoid jitter that is introduced from playing from the CD.

Gordan Rankin recommends having 2 firewire hard-drives, with one acting as backup. The control can also be with a remote that comes with the Mac mini, or Imac, if you use one of those as your control computer. Itunes can act as your archival/control software. It will organize your CD's, and fetch album art automatically. As to the sonics, I will know more in a week or two.

David

David,
Thanks in advance for the help. I have not made the jump to PC music, yet. A couple of questions, if I may...
1. Do you copy music to your ipod for the car?
2. Do you distribute the music to other rooms in the house and do you need an RF remote?
3. Since the HD does all the work do you need a sophisticated computer or would the simplest computer with massive HD space work? Have you tried different computers? It seems that the better the DAC, the better the sound. Is that right?

Thanks again. I like my CDP. My next upgrade will be to a fine DAC in preparation for a conversion to PC.

I traded a Wadia 861 for a Wavelength Brick Silver.

Prior to obtaining a MacBook to drive the Brick, I used a very old Dell Pentium II desktop with an external hard drive. With the exception of PC fan noise, the sonics were the same as the MacBook -- superb! So, as long as one is using an external DAC, and a "silent" PC (the MacBook is), the PC doesn't have to be state of the art!

Sonics are superb, convenience is spectacular -- even better than I had imagined! In my book this is an impossible combination to beat. Of course, one has to do a lot of ripping. But over the years my son and I had ripped hundreds of discs in order to record compilations. So the software was present, and backed-up, we have duplicates of each others tunes stored at different sites.

For my purposes, the game is over.

The time to upgrade my front end has come and gone and I'm reluctantly leaning towards a PC based system. Wavelength DACs seem to be all the buzz but folks are talking like there are three different DACs where as I count seven: Brick MSRP $1750, Cosecant MSRP $3500 Silver $10,000 USD, Ultimate DPU $11,000 Silver $17,500, Crimson $7500, Silver $15,000. The raves I hear seem to be about the silver units which are out of my price range(at least new). Must one pony up for the silver to get the MAGIC or does the copper come close? Thanks