Music from hard drive better than CD?

There seems to be a fundamental distinction here between digital music servers (hard drive based systems that store CD music in various forms in a single audio style component) and Media Hubs (which organize music that is on a computer hard drive and potentially network digital music throughout one's home).

Excuse my basic terminology but I am trying to sort all this out. I think I am interested in a music server that can hold all of my CD's (400 or so) in a lossless state where I can access songlists and album art on a video display. Anyone know of a product that does this?

Pardales, any Apple computer and an external hard drive can do what you're looking for. The G5 models have built-in digital (optical) I/O, but require an external monitor. The laptops and iMacs would require an external digital connector such as those offered by M-Audio or Apogee. All the Apples include iTunes software as part of the purchase package. Such a system will also perfectly integrate with an iPod to add portability to the listening. Apple.

Yes, I own stock in Apple.

Onhwy61: I have an apple laptop but it is my work computer and I do not want to load all of my discs to it. Also, I figure I would need about a 280 GB hard drive to store all of my discs in a lossless format. So I don't think a regular CPU will work for me.

My recommendation is to get an Apple and use it solely as a music server. I don't see the connection between your disc storage space requirements and the CPU. Playing back stereo tracks is a trivial tasks for even a 100Mhz computer.

You can rip 400 CD's uncompressed into 200 GB. If you chose a lossless
codec like Apple Lossless, I'm told you can get twice that, or 400 CD's into
100 GB. Get an external hard drive and keep all of your CD's on it.

There is another way to go, too.

The Mac Mini:

http://www.apple.com/macmini/

Integrate that into your audio system; use your video display as your monitor,
take the audio signal out in digital through one of the USB ports and use a
high quality USB DAC like the Apogee Mini-Dac, and connect an external hard
drive from the FireWire port.

That would make a hell of a dedicated music storage and transport system.

Get a mouse and you could scroll through your songs and albums on your
video screen using i-tunes.