BAASnotes.com – Bay Area Audiophile Society

Music players — I Mean Servers?

CES featured a new trend – music players that act like music servers. In particular, they can:

• Read music from a hard drive and play it;
• Play hi-rez disks directly (like Ref Recordings HRx); and
• Rip the music from CD to hard drive (in some cases)

A couple of these new machines were the rage at CES. Soundstage (among others) has the details here and here. (One of them even has tubes!) I think that PSaudio will sell a bunch of their product. They have the engineering budget to really do things right, and seem to have the vision as well.

One sobering note: of the four products that I saw in this category in Vegas, two were “down” for a period of time for software errors (“bugs”). It’s hell being on the bleeding edge….

In any case, this category will likely do well as a whole. Many audiophiles are turned off by the concept of a “computer in the music room.” Likewise, using a computer to rip/organize a massive music library is daunting. So the appeal of just inserting a disk and getting the sonic benefit of playback from a large memory buffer is substantial.

For me, I’ll take a Mac/1TB drive/Firewire any day!  <g>

bob walters