Digital Media for MP3

As anyone had any experience with the Western Digital media player WDAAVN00BN or similar product. I have a ton of music on my PC that I would like to transfer to a external hard drive. I understand the Western media player will work with any external hard drive. My current 200 Kenwood CD changer does not sound bad but is getting a little old. I am wondering what sound quality I would get with such a device thru my 970/7125.

I keep all of my digiatal music on a 1 TB external hard drive. I use iTunes to play it and transfer it between my iPods and PC.

I use a classic Squeezebox v3 to serve files off of my PC. The Squeezebox feeds into my RR2150. I have ripped all of my CD's to iTunes using Apple's lossless compression and it really sounds good. The few songs I have from my daughters's using Apple 128KB compression sound terrible by comparison.

How the music is stored is important. As 73Bruin points out, lossless solutions like FLAC, lossless WMA, and Apple lossless are going to be pretty well equal to a CD as far as the quality of source material. Once you have the files ripped, there are a lot of different ways to play those files back, and some ways will sound better than others. The Western Digital device is cheap and simple, and with an optical digital output it should allow you to lean on another device in the signal path (the 970 in your case) to handle D/A conversion. As far as I can tell, you'll need to move the USB drive between the WD player and your computer to add music. That could be avoidable by using a USB-equipped NAS device ("network-attached storage" - hard drive with a network interface) that you can access from your computer over your network without unhooking the USB. It can also be avoidable by using a network-compatible device such as the Squeezebox, AppleTV, or a number of other options. In that case, though, you need a network connection to the equipment rack (either wired or wireless) and a storage source that's always available (either an always-on PC or a NAS device). I've done a bit of tinkering with this using an older AppleTV as well as the DLNA (digital living network alliance) support in my BDP-83 and BDP-93 players, but I haven't migrated to it in any significant fashion.

A studio here in Denver has a sticker on the booth that reads " Friends don't let friends listen to MP3's".

Isn't that the truth!

A couple of years ago at South by Southwest, here in Austin Tx., I believe it was Lou Reed who was the speaker, said that the iPod and MP3's were the worst thing that had ever happened to music. He went on the explain it wasn't just the financial aspect of people downloading music for free. But more importantly it was the horrible sound quality that people now accept as the norm. Furthermore, with people being able to buy a song at a time or listen to songs via "shuffle" it took away all the artistic creativity of producing an album that was a true collection of songs that were meant to be heard as a whole.

I personally never rip CD's to any format that isn't lossless. And I avoid using the shuffle mode. I truly like the concept of listening to the album. The artist selected a collection of songs for a reason. If I truly want to hear what the artist intended then I should give him the respect of listening to the album as he intended it to be.

Personally, I like the concept of being able to store all of my recordings onto a single type of media. However, the media player must capture and replay the source with complete digital accuracy. Otherwise it's just not worth it to me. I have not committed completely to a media server as of yet because I haven't found one that fully meets my requirements. As stated, first and foremost it must maintain digital accuracy from capture through playback. Next, it must support all forms of media. As of yet, I know of no device that can rip all forms of media, i.e. CD, BD, SACD, DVD, DVD-A,etc. If anyone knows of such a system please let me know. My assumption is simply the device would capture the digital image, no decoding, and then play back the digital source providing the appropriate bit stream that would have been generated from the source playback device, i.e PCM, DSD, etc. This could then be sent to a Pre/Pro that could decode the bit stream. At that point it should make no difference if the source was played from its conventional device or streamed from a media player.

I have DVD-A and SACD's ripped as flacs.

OK, I'll bite. How do you do it? Also, what about play back? Will this same system rip other formats, CDs, BDs, etc. If so, is there one big catalog for all the media?

Thanks,
Mark

Its software and a PC. It does rip other media types too. Mine are all flacs, loaded into VLC they play 5.1 mixes. I have the entire Talking Heads box set in this form.

Can you give me more details. What software? Is this a commercial package? What transport do you use that will read and SACD or DVD-A on a PC? Will it also do BDs? Once you have it ripped how do you get it to your pre/pro? Is it an HDMI connection? What about the SQ as compared to playing the media directly from a dedicated source? If this does what I think you are saying then I will want to build one of my own, so please provide enough information.

Thank You,
Mark

A while back I bought a Behringer UFO202 which came with a program called Audacity. The program itself is free on the net at a lot of places. The UFO202 takes an input from the tape out on my 990 and converts the analog signal to a digital version which Audacity save as a file on my PC. I can then go into that file on the PC and remove the noise from vinyl. The same type of thing can probable be done with SACDs if you just want them to be stereo.

This might be of interest:

http://ubb.outlawaudio.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=84281&page=1

DVD Audio Extractor works well for DVD-A. It converts it directly to FLAC. SACD is less legal software that I am afraid you need to know a computer geek to get, but it IS out there and completely doable.