Music from hard drive better than CD?

>>Rsbeck: Do you run the Apogee mini Dac into a pre-amp or straing into a set of powered monitors?<<

I run it straight into powered monitors. There is no need for a pre-amp. This is one of the things I like about this set-up. The Apogee Mini-Dac has balanced outs and my powered monitors have balanced inputs. You go from computer to Dac to powered speakers -- very short path, lots of efficiencies, you eliminate the cables between amplifier and speakers, don't have to run the signal through a pre-amp, and it sounds great.

>>Can it be run into a preamp (like any DAC)? Thanks<<

It can be run into a pre-amp or you can go straight from the Apogee to your amplifier. The Apogee has a volume control and balanced outs.

Thanks Edesilva, I had always assumed that there was a significant drawback to the long digital coax, even going into the "jitter buster" Meridian 518, so I replaced the long coax with an equally long USB cable attached to an M-Audio Audiophile USB box and a 1m digital coax into the 518. This setup sounds significantly better, and it is now comparable to the Meridian transport, but not quite there yet.

I'm thinking of trying the hardwired version of the slimdevices squeezebox to see if that makes an improvement. It is certainly a more flexible, user-friendly, device and having my entire music collection available at the press of a remote button is enticing.

Glad to hear you wrung some improvements out of the system. I'd be curious to hear the results of using the Squeezebox. I used to have a host of Audiotrons around my house run off my hardwired ethernet. I liked the search capabilities and the fact that the Audiotrons were autonomous and didn't require any software running on a server--each Audiotron indexes all available music files in public directories, maintains its own catalog, and pulls files down as needed. I gather the Slim devices require some server to "push" the data out to the Squeezebox.

The reasons the Audiotrons have fallen into disuse in my house are:

(i) Whenever there is a brownout or some kind of network fault, they have to reindex the songs, which can take a good 15 minutes with a large collection. Since the audiotrons were in areas I didn't use everyday, it seemed like they were reindexing every time I wanted to use them.

(ii) The indexing works great with mp3s, but tag implementation for .wav files is spotty and the only way of putting "tags" on your .wav files uses is manually using some audiostation software that isn't--in my book--reliable with large libraries. The tagging is also nonstandard, so the effort is audiotron specific. Ugh. While the Audiotron supports some other lossless compression schemes, I function in a mixed windows/OSx environment, and have to deal with the lowest common denominator between iTunes and Windows media players--right now that seems to be .wav.

Anyway, good luck with the Squeezebox. I think the SB won't suffer from (i), but I'd be curious what your experience with the software is related to (ii).

I use the slim server software, which you can get and run on it's own, and it works well. It can stream most any format of music (shorten, flac, wav etc) over the internet (you'll need a fat upstream pipe), handles 100,000+ songs no problem, and is fairly easy to use on multiple platforms (pure perl). You can also administer a whole collection over the web, and access your music from anywhere on the internet (works great on a lan).
It is a great piece of Open Source software regardless of whether you buy the hardware, and this is part of my motivation to get the hardware [shameless plug for Open Source].

http://slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html

Well, I finally got my music server together and I am very impressed with the sound. I am using a G4 laptop, a Lacie hard drive, and a Waveterminal U24. Music off of the hard drive sounds excellent, and I LOVE having my music accessible via iTunes.