Meehan Mydog wrote:

Is there is a hi-fi unit sized machine available on the market yet which
has the capacity to enable digital storage of several hundred
_uncompressed_ CDs? I think I'm talking in TBs here.

What I am thinking of would be a sort of non-portable 'grown-up' iPod,
which would have all the convenience of the iPod combined with the sound
quality of a genuine hi-fi unit.

Does one exist yet?

Regards,
Meehan

Not too hard to make a PC based unit with a good sound card. 1TB of
storage can cost less than $200 these days. You can rip to lossless
formats like WAV. The main problem is the software but there are some
options available.

Some people even reckon that the sound off a PC is better with less
jitter than straight off a CD, personally I think that there are
excellent opportunities to create jitter in the PC.

I am in the early days of designing a unit for myself using embedded
processors and solid state storage together with a good quality DAC. The
solid state storage will be in the form of a number of SD cards which
can be replaced as the price comes down to increase the storage
capacity. It is not intended to hold a complete collection but to be
used in conjunction with a PC server holding the main collection and the
files being downloaded for use. 32 Gigs of storage would hold about 40
uncompressed CDs which would cover the majority of listening for most
people, with a delay of a few seconds if a CD has to be called up from
the server across the LAN, certainly a lot quicker that manually loading
a CD.

Keith

Keith