Several technical questions to build a music server
patrickwang -- Fri, 06/13/2008 - 11:09
I have several questions in building my own music server. I have a Sony XA-9000es CD player. My questions are:
1). Is there any way that I can use the player's DAC since I think the player is pretty good and its DAC quality should be above many standalone DACs? If there is no digital input for this player, is it possible to add an input by DIY or have some company modify it?
2). Is it a good idea to use the player's digital output connecting a computer to rip music file since the player's CD drive is much superior than a computer's CD/DVD drive? If this does not make any significant improvement, why are so many hi-end manufactures willing to spend money to improve the mechanism and built the drive like a tank?
3). the last question is nothing to do with the server but with the issue Robert Harley commented before. To my understanding, Robert Harley's conclusion that a server sounds better than a CD player (both use a Esoteric DAC) is because of more jitters caused by the CD player. If this is the reason, is it possible to have all CD player manufactures to make CD players with a hard drive between the transport and DAC? Whenever playing CDs, the transport rips tracks to the hard drive and then send the digital signal to the DAC. In this way, the jitters should be reduced and the sound quality will be greatly improved. is there anybody who can advise me on these questions? I don't know the technology much and hope you can help me.
You can have a digital input added to your player, but it might not be worth the expense. You might consider a good USB DAC such as the Benchmark USB DAC ($1250, I believe). This will give you more flexibiility as well, with USB and SPDIF inputs.
There should be no difference in sound quality between your computer's drive and the drive in an outboard transport. All you are doing is recovering the data for recording on another medium. Transports make a sonic difference only when the data they recover are being converted to analog and listened to. Jitter isn't a factor when transferring data, only when those data are converted to analog (unless the jitter is so great as to introduce bit errors, an unlikely scenario). The CD drives in the music servers I've tested are PC-type drives, and these systems produce superior sound when listening to a CD that has been ripped to a hard drive.
There is a CD player that inserts a hard-disk drive into the playback chain: the Nova Physics Memory Player. The device records a CD to a hard drive, and you listen from the hard drive. I haven't heard one, but all reports are that it sound considerably better than the original CD. Contrary to the manufacturer's claims, the better sound has nothing to do with more accurate data recovery. Any CD transport can recover, with perfect bit-for-bit accuracy, the data on a disc.
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