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Hard drive storage still need good cd player?

Starting moving my CD's to my media center PC. I connected the PC via digital optic to my external DAT converter (proceed) and the sound is pretty good. I haven't done serious listening, I just did this for the convieniance and ability to have music playing without having to change CD, when doing chores or have company over type of thing.

So while I'm recording this to the HD, I started woundering, what is the difference with having the music stored on the HD compared to the cd it came on..? The CD is just a transport with a laser pickup that reads bits and bytes and sends it to the dac as accurately as possible. So if you where able to get a great copy of a cd onto a hard drive, and pump that to the DAC you don't need a 5K cd player. One step forward, and what if I could simply buy the music already copied with the best equipment possible directly to a file I could download.

For reference, I'm using a classe cd/dvd player with proceed avp, classe cam 200 mono blocks and bw 802 speakers.

Michel
michel_findlay
tboooe's avatar
tboooe
1,009 posts
 
I have both. For me, I have over 40K songs so for the sake of hard drive space I rip at 256 VBR to MP3 format. For critical listening I use my cdp. I am able to discern a loss in soundstaging and imaging with my digital music. Things sound compressed (duh!) with a loss of dynamics. But I am happy to make the trade off for convenience of quickly accessing my music.

I suppose if you are ripping to FLAC or some other lossless format then all you would need is a really nice DAC.
audioengr
3,282 posts
 
The data on the CD and the data on the HD should be identical if you get a good rip. The difference will be the jitter levels on playback. A Computer with the right converter with low-jitter clock will have much lower jitter than the CD player or transport.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
manufacturer
thesauce
21 posts
 
Hi Michel,

I use to have that same idea... I moved all my cd's into Media Center and planned using the digi outs to an external DAC and figured it would sound just the same or better seeing that it's reading from a Hard Drive. Unfortunately this is not the case. Try a cheap DVD or CD player and run it to your DAC and have a listen. Actually, burn a CD from some of the files you are playing off your HTPC so you know that it can't be any better. The CD player sounds much better. I hear that the Windows KMixer has a lot to do with this, but I've used ASIO drivers and Kernal streaming drivers that are supposed to bypass this mixer and they sounded better, but not as good as any CD player transport. I can only tell on a good system though, but on that system it is obvious. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks!

Ben
ckorody
640 posts
 
You've got the gist of it. Most people who have gone this route are a) really happy after they work out the details, b) have sold their $5K unite and c) are keeping the CDs in a box somewhere as ultimate back-up. Practically speaking, re-ripping a large collection is too boring to contemplate so a hard drive back-up strategy needs to be part of your master plan.
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