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.