Who has found happiness giving up cd player?

I started playing with an old mac laptop and a music streamer plus. The convenience was great, the sound OK. I finally "got" what having an i-pod was all about though - you get to hear music that you haven't heard in years because you never think to dig it out. The server in shuffle takes care of that problem. In short, I started out slowly and am now hooked on a server based system.

I'm now on to Mac Mini and just replaced an Ayre QB-9 with a Metric Halo LIO-8 inteface. The DAC's in the MH are, IMHO, superb and you can also use it to record things to the server at 24/192 or whatever sample rate you choose. I use Pure Vinyl to archive records at 24/192 and the Pure Music part of the software for general digital playback. I agree with the recent August 2010 Stereophile article by Fremer - using pure Vinyl with digital RIAA equalization is certainly the best vinyl playback I've had in my house, and my old phono pre (Aesthetix RHEA), while not state of the art was pretty decent. The Music Streamer was a decent budget DAC, the Ayre was great and (with Pure Music) the best digital ever in my house to that point, but the MH is even better. IMHO, it sounds better at any playback sample rate, goes to 192K and has so much more flexibility. Bottom line is I have both better convenience and sound with my server setup. I don't miss a CD player at all. If you haven't yet chosen a computer, I highly recommmend a Mac Mini - it is small, quiet, and has both USB and built in Firewire so you can use pretty much any DAC. Plus, as far as I know, neither Amarra nor Pure Music will run on a PC, and one of them is essential for the best server sound.

I do not consider the Ayre QB-9 cheap at €2700,- not cheap by a long shot. When using streaming audio do you need a DAC that can handel a higher sample rate then 16-bit/44.1kHz?

I will never give up simple CD playback. Anything to do with computer based music, is just one big pain.

Mbhintz,

The QB-9 also does 192.

Camelboy,

Precisely. Why give up the ease of a CD player, particularly when you can buy a model with quality digital inputs and have the best of both worlds. In any case, computers don't do SACD and the selection of high resolution music for download is, if we are going to be generous, limited. I would love to build a computer based delivery system to augment CD replay, but, unfortunately, there just is not currently an adequate selection of high resolution music to push me over the edge. Maybe in 3-5 years things will be different.

Right, it sure is a pain to have all of my music arranged by any of about 30 different ways (artist, genre, album, etc.) and be able to access any of them with just a few clicks of a mouse and the ability to do this from my comfy chair, the ability to play any or all randomly by shuffle play by album or song, to make and save playlists of any songs in my collection in any order, the ability to access hundreds of streaming radio stations and other music services, the ability with Pure Music to apply plug-ins for a variety of EQs or tone controls if I wish as well as triamp with no passive crossovers and time align my drivers, and many other things.

I didn't realize what a pain it is to have a computer based system! Now that I do I'll be sure to go back to a CD player and lose all of those painful features.

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