Is this the future of the next CD player

05-01-06: Ericrulifson
I look forward to something similar for large collections and audiophile sensibilities.

Red Wine Audio is offering mods for the Olive Symphony and Musica.

http://www.redwineaudio.com/Olive.html

I reckon the Squeezebox and music downloads is more like the next thing - not something that plays disks. It makes more sense to store music on a centralised server and play the music from a distributed clients. Music retail distribution via disks will survive for some time but having to root it out whenever you want to play it is silly.

JA gave the Olive high praise in the April issue of Stereophile.

"NOTHING beats the graphic interface of a mouse and monitor for navigating your vast library of music."

Some people don't want a a noisy PC/monitor in their listening room.

The Olives and Cambridge(it can handle external HDs or network to your PC's library of music) are just the start of these in the room devises. All those DVD recorders with HDs from the big name companies are music servers waiting to happen.

"Some people don't want a a noisy PC/monitor in their listening room."

Since when were monitors noisy? Unless you're using a CRT, which are rapidly getting phased out by affordable and virtually silent LCD's. The solution that I'm creating for myself about the noisy PC? Remove the PC from the listening room entirely, and just connect the monitor through a long cable or a CAT5 RGB converter or similar device. Or, design or buy yourself a silent PC. Both of these solutions are completely viable even with the products out on the market today.

When I get my setup complete in the next few months (I'm currently living in a dorm about to graduate) I'll post pics of my virtual system or whatever, and it will be in my mind what future HD based systems will look like.