mcintosh MT10 turntable good or not.

John, I listened to a music server and a good one I think. I also listened to the same Cd on the same system at same volume and the disc sounded better than the server. These just happened to be in the same cabinet togeter and I asked the store to let me hear the difference and they did. Ofcoarse they were pleasantly suprised that there was infact a difference although you wouldn't probably notice unless you tested that way. They were trying to get me to buy the server but after that I decided to buy the classe cdp202. (not the cd player used in this test) All cd's were put into this server with lostless download but its definately different.

John, also forgot to mention. I have a couple of xrcd's from music direct and I find them very nice even in my rotel player. Have you tryed these at all?

I'm not surprised at you findings regarding the disc sounding better than the server, much downloaded music is highly compressed at a lower bit rate. I still think the people will win, and downloaded music is much cheaper than buying and storing cd's. My wife would love to have a two walls back that are occupied with software. She knows she's not getting the LP wall back, but I can see the gleam in her eye about that cd wall.......in fact she just asked me nicely if I could go through my cd collection and clean out 'some that I haven't listened too for a few years'. Her point is I have 4 large storage cabinets that were starting to overflow. I did clean out about 100 cd's, enough to clear up the overflow/clutter. Now I just have to decide what to do with 'em. I don't even know if anyone buys used cd's anymore....

Yes, I have a few XRCD's, they are pretty good, but overpriced. If I recall correctly XRCD's were priced higher than SACD, and are not quite as good as SACD, IMHO.

re: server vs. disc: you were comparing different players, not the formats. You would need to compare a server vs. a transport through the same external DAC using the same digital cable for your comparison to be valid. Under such circumstances, the word is that the server will win out, and for predictable technical reasons. Robert Harley just reported on this issue in TAS in a rather compelling article. The other case he made was for what he found to be far superior logistics of filing, cross-referencing and accessing on the server.

You are correct piediper the two units compared were useing there internal DAC's and the ones in the cdp are more advanced than the servers even though they are the same brand. I didn't even think about that.