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
2 Comments to Music players — I Mean Servers?
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Bob,
Did you get to hear the Blue Smoke Systems Black Box? Was it one of the systems that was down?
http://www.bluesmokesystems.com/blackbox.htm
I heard Jeff Fritz of Ultra Audio is going to make part of his TWBAS (The Word’s Beest Audio System). article.
Kevin
Kevin,
I didn’t bother with this system. If I wanted a “tweaked Windows Vista” box, I’d build it myself (and externally clock it).
Most music server folks that I know prefer either Mac OS-X (sound card or firewire) or Win XP (with sound card).
So I don’t know its SQ or if it was up or down, but knowing Windows….
Bob