Music from hard drive better than CD?

I use the slim server software, which you can get and run on it's own, and it works well. It can stream most any format of music (shorten, flac, wav etc) over the internet (you'll need a fat upstream pipe), handles 100,000+ songs no problem, and is fairly easy to use on multiple platforms (pure perl). You can also administer a whole collection over the web, and access your music from anywhere on the internet (works great on a lan).
It is a great piece of Open Source software regardless of whether you buy the hardware, and this is part of my motivation to get the hardware [shameless plug for Open Source].

http://slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html

Well, I finally got my music server together and I am very impressed with the sound. I am using a G4 laptop, a Lacie hard drive, and a Waveterminal U24. Music off of the hard drive sounds excellent, and I LOVE having my music accessible via iTunes.

That's the beauty of a hard drive based system. Vastly greater convenience with ready access to your entire music collection without any penalty in sound quality. It worthwhile to take the time to use the rating, comment, composer and grouping fields to organize your music into playlist.

Let me preface this with just how ignorant I am with regard to most of this technoogy. I am challanged by the idea that a highly frictionaly induced, magnetic, vulnerable, hard drive system can be superior to a minimally frictionaly induced, optical, secure CD system. Re: Mac vs. Windows, for better or worse (and I think potentionaly better) convergence of audio and video is comming. In this regard I think Apple has way to go before they catch up with Windows XP Media Center 2005.

My computer using aes/ebu playing .wav files on winamp sounds as good or better than my Modwright Sony 999es using spdif or even RCA on bypass.

Exact Audio Copy is very good. So is Foobar.

I use the CDP to preview CD's or to play when I don't feel like letting the computer take time "booting up". I noticed that I do not need warm up time like I do with the Sony using RCA on bypass.