Life is complicated, lets keep it simple.


My wife and I are venturing into "PC audio". We are neophytes for both PC and Audio. With regards to the "Audio" we have a good simple system consisting on Paradigm V100's and Plinuis amp (8200) and intregrated amp (8200) driving them. We have a simple harmon kardon cd player we use for the source. We have recently purchased a Mac pro and are about to create a itunes library with our current CD collection. Hear are my questions:
1. What is the simplest/best way to "carry" an album/music from our computer to the stereo without having to burn a CD. Would a ipod or some other type of portable hard drive interface with the stereo to create very good sounding "cd quality music"? Could I load this portable hard drive on the computer, walk it to the stereo and plug it in to have music.
2. What is the best format to record albums onto itunes. Loseless may be best but is too big. Is apple losless the holy grail? If quality is the issue do I bite the bullet and buy lots of HD for only lossless formats or will apple losless be good enough.
tas5fceb
It is simple. You simply open EAC and then put the CD into the CDROM or DVDROM drive and "rip" it to the hard disk. You select the tracks that you want to rip in EAC. Here is a download site for EAC:

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/index.html

None of the lossless formats are perfect except maybe FLAC. I rip everything uncompressed as .wav files. Use "test and copy" command of EAC.

Steve N.
Get the small Airport Express from apple and you will be up and running in no time....send music wirelessly from your Mac pro to your existing gear.

It can't get any simpler then that. Plug it in (connect the audio to your amp with a 1/8 inch stereo to RCA adapter), use your airport assitant to set it up, launch iTunes and off you go.

As for formats and hard drive space. I prefer lossless compressed music rather than lossy formats although the differences are not always readily apparent - so don't let this stop you using iTunes and buying tracks from the apple store.

Hard drive space is getting to a competitive level with stacked CD changers. I use four Mega changers. A CD mega changer costs about $1 per CD of storage. Alternatively, 1 Gb of hard drive storage space costs roughy the same (you need roughly 1 Gb per CD of storage in order to have backup space as an umcompressed redbook CD takes roughly 500 to 600 Mb). I would suggest to use a RAID drive system or mirrored drive system with multiple hard drives to ensure backup. Five years ago when I built my system around Mega changers, the hard drive option was much more expensive...now I think hard drives are very competitive.

If you are a serious SOTA audiophile then you could try sending digital out to a DAC of your choice (rather than use the DAC's in the Express) or go for a SOTA slim devices transporter, which by all accounts uses some of the best DAC's in the biz.

G'luck
Simple is the keyword. Airport Express would be the way to go for you as Shadorne sugests, but you would need a decent Digital to Analog Converter (DAC)for acceptable sound quality (wireless signal from Mac Pro to Airport Express, optical digital cable from Airport Express (it has analog outputs too but not of audiophile quality) to a DAC.. and there you go, playing directly from iTunes in the computer. I would also recommend apple lossless... rip cds with the error correction checked. If you hesitate because of space requirement, you can get external USB hard drives for more space... price on these is really comming down. Good luck!