Why Purchase A CD Player or Transport ?

@esarhaddon 

What places have you visited in Denver ? Soundings Fine Audio and Crescendo both are high end and have very knowledgeable sales people. 

ronboco
Crescendo was the shop that used the Xbox, and the salesperson spent more time making excuses as to why I couldn't hear anything below about 60 Hz (he had removed his sub) instead of making sure his system was running its finest. I did call ahead and tell them exactly what I wants and expected. Also, their walls are paper thin and I got more sound from the unit in the room next door than the one I wanted to hear.
Soundings, What can I say, I believe this is the store that just moved and they are not even set up for auditions.
Two or three other stores, have TXT windows on their web pages and they pretend to talk to you for ages upon ages only to be told they will have someone call you back and no one ever dies. on One of those sites the person I was texting actually thought that Marantz was a speaker manufacturer.
Denver has nothing but Losers (LOOZERS!) for contact people. Colorado Springs has far better options but not many. One store there actually offered to let me bring in my speakers and try them on their amps. Not an easy task as they are full towers and weigh about 80+ lbs ea. I thought that was brave of them. But were they knowledgeable all they would have to do is pop a meter on my speaks and see what they measure before connecting than to their Equip. Also, the Springs has a few National class designers living there.

I try not to mention names, but you brought them up.

A proper high resolution server will have no spinning parts, hence less vibration, with lower noise through a quality internal LPS, SSD storage and file caching, and improved isolation from non-digital signals. You will get a bit further with your money this route, as chances are you would invest in a file server down the road anyways once buying, storing, and playing discs becomes too cumbersome.

The NUC you have is a great start but there are much better server solutions that include the features I list above, and the sound quality will be a huge step forward with them as a result. Happy to chat options with you over PM.

 

My NUC is a fanless SSD Roon Rock, which manages file caching. I believe that clean power is important. I use an Everest and Shunyata NR power cords. I also pay attention to component power supplies and try to cleanup ethernet noise prior to entering my streamer. I have an upgraded LPS for my phono preamplifier and streamer, but I was under the impression that the music server did not benefit by replacing the switching supply. Of course, the truth of the matter is best served by A/B.

Hmmm.  Millions of available albums?  My lifetime isn't long enough to enjoy even a fraction, so I think I'll stick with my vinyl, CDs, SACDs and a few cassettes to keep myself entertained.

A few notes from my experience.

I have ripped my collection of 4000+ CDs to uncompressed FLAC (I still have all my CDs). I can't hear much if any difference between the original CD played through my PSA PerfectWave transport and PW MKII DAC vs. the FLAC. When I compare the same version on Qobuz I get the same result. They sound virtually identical to me. I'm playing Qobuz and my FLACs through my Asus ROG laptop hooked up to my DAC with USB. Couldn't be simpler.

If you have a significant number of HDCDs then you will need a player or DAC that can decode them. If you rip them with dB Poweramp it has the ability to decode them and make a 20 bit file that recovers the additional dynamic range. On a few titles I have compared my ripped FLAC with the disc itself using my Krell CD250 and I think the disc may sound a little bit better than the FLAC. One thing I can say for sure is that an HDCD sounds better played through an HDCD capable player vs. a Red Book player. I go out of my way to collect titles that have this format. Part of the reason I think HDCDs generally sound good is because the studio had to use Pacific Microsonics converters which were the best available at the time.

I haven't compared my SACDs to their hi res counterparts on Qobuz. One of these days I'll try a few to see how they stack up.