Music from hard drive better than CD?

I'm still trying to figure out what to do here--I'm about 70% through ripping the 1000+ CDs in the Rock/Blues genre... I seriously encourage folks to think about standalone storage, since ultimately you will want to access your music from other places in your house besides the one PC they are resident on. Right now, I'm running three audiotrons and one CD30, as well as a USB audio device off my PC.

My latest thinking is something like this for storage:

http://store.niveusmedia.com/s.nl/sc.2/category.10/it.A/id.455/.f

I was originally going to go with a bunch of LaCie external USB 2.0 drives and a Linksys $90 NAS box, but I discovered, much to my chagrin, that the NAS box they have requires you to format the disks in a proprietary format. Doesn't work for me. I'm ripping the CDs to the LaCie drives, but I worry about their long term viability--these puppies run hot. Just don't think they are really designed for 24/7 operation.

The selling points of the Niveus server seem to be quiet (no fans), component-like aesthetics, and $ (Dell quoted me about $14K for 1.5TB of RAID5 storage. Unlike everyone else, I'm ripping the whole CD--I don't wanna go back and do this again.

I'm also intrigued by the Niveus PCs like the Denali HDTV; I've been leery of putting a computer in my rig until seeing their fanless ultraquiet numbers... But then, I also found this:

http://www.logicsupply.com/product_info.php/cPath/29/products_id/51

Trying to decide now whether I want to embark on the fullblown HTPC/Windows Media Center Edition or something to just serve up WAV files...

Interesting stuff!

I knew there was a reason to wait on the server 'til after CES announcements... This puppy is due out in Feb. May not be as quiet as the Niveus, but at this price ($1K) it can live in the garage...

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail.php?productid=97&categoryid=19

Hmmmm. Something is not right here.

$50 portable CD players incorporate electronic antiskip mechanisms by reading ahead 5-10 seconds and storing the data in a buffer--and they are far from audiophile grade transports or players. The challenge of high fidelity playback is not limited to problems with spinning a disk, and it is absolutely no surprise the today's PC hard drive configs don't compete with EMM Labs gear.

CD audio encoding is surprisingly complex (e.g., see http://www.ee.washington.edu/conselec/CE/kuhn/cdaudio2/95x7.htm). And one result of this is very high bit-for-bit fidelity. It is true that the CD Audio redbook spec has less error correction that CD-ROM--i.e., it "allows" a certain level of interpolation of data--but in general it seems that this is not the problem (see a classic at http://stereophile.com/reference/590jitter/index.html); good transports or bad, you can be pretty sure that your DAC is getting a bit-perfect feed.

The next area to look at is jitter. This is any variance between the actual data clock and an ideal clock. Transports, hard drive controllers, DMAs--they are all going to have jitter, so replacing a transport with a hard drive will not remove this problem. It may allow it to be mitigated--or may be not: PCs are hostile environments and jitter is measured in *billionths* of a second.

There is no doubt that mitigating jitter can improve audio reproduction, but in Harley's article at the above URL he looks at CD tweaks and found audible differences yet no difference in jitter; i.e., something other than jitter--at least as he was measuing it--was causing an effect on his "perfect sound forever."

I think the problem is in the CD format when it leaves the factory or the website, and you are doomed before you ever bring it into your house. Here's why: The CD spec does not store the time information along with the amplitude. It just stores the amplitude, and the clock is recovered from the signal. If they had spec-ed it in packets like TCP/IP embedding clock and amplitude, then you could recover ALL the data, amplitude and time, bit-perfect, from a CD, a website, even a carrier pigeon--the transport mechanism wouldn't matter. But the clock is implied in the signal, and that means that it has to be re-created at playback. Ever wonder why transports make a difference on playback? It's because the servo is jerking the DC waveform and introducing trash in other parts of the CDP; same with digital cables: because the clock is not "data" per se, the way your DAC gets the data through your cables from the transport can affect the time reconstruction.

I think computers have a lot to offer audio, and, like digital amps, may drop the price floor on very good reproduction. But for *really* good reproduction, it'll be years before anything beats a CDP or TT.

>>it is absolutely no surprise the today's PC hard drive configs don't compete
with EMM Labs gear.<<

Surprise? Who said this was a surprise?

>>good transports or bad, you can be pretty sure that your DAC is getting a
bit-perfect feed.<<

Okay.

>>jitter...replacing a transport with a hard drive will not remove this
problem.<<

You're not just replacing the transport with a hard drive; If you use
something like the Apogee Mini-Dac, you're also introducing a high quality
clock and DAC.

>>something other than jitter--at least as he was measuing it--was causing
an effect on his "perfect sound forever."<<

There are many things that go into making a great sounding DAC.

>>But for *really* good reproduction, it'll be years before anything beats a
CDP or TT.<<

That's vague. Depends on what you call a *really* good CDP. It has already
been established that a computer plus $1,000 DAC will not compete with
$10,000 Emm Labs gear, but neither will any other digital gear.

A computer plus $1,000 DAC absolutely sounds better to my ears than many
CD players.