In Reply to: RE: PC audio IS mainstream audio. posted by Charles Hansen on January 31, 2009 at 09:05:06:
I didn't say that computers weren't tweaky, rather that everything else is also at the "audiophile level". Naturally I know that you know that.
While I agree with your comments, they are just symptoms of a paradigm shift and the pain involved in moving data between media. I feel it intensely, I didn't get all my slides and negatives done before my scanner died, I still haven't done my records. The CD to HD transition is nothing compared with those. So while I'm not there yet, I know where I'm going and that will be some form of NAS from which all my music, pictures and other data will be served to everything else in the house.
The boot time concern is specious, even my slowest computer restores from hibernation in seconds and the back-up and archive issues are far better addressed with a NAS and an offsite archive than relying upon physical media subject to theft, fire and flooding and, in the case of records and tapes, wear and aging.
Assuming we don't do the recording, I'm convinced that soon the audiophile part of our systems will only extend from ethernet to the speakers and room. The mere fact that you are introducing a DAC suggests to me that you also know where things are heading and realize the it's the high performance implementation that we either pay for or invest the time and effort to do ourselves, not the architecture. If you aren't already at work on your own "high end squeezebox" you probably should be.
GP computers will likely remain the best tool for managing our audio (and other) data for the foreseeable future, and I imagine that we will continue to listen to our music through them if we are at them doing something else anyway. For now, if I'm at my computer and want to listen to a CD, I stick it in one of the drives and listen to it, it's really easy. And if I do rip, I don't tag. Maybe I should, but just having the composer and work in the filename seems adequate.
Regards, Rick
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Follow Ups
- RE: PC audio IS mainstream audio. - rick_m 10:37:25 01/31/09 (1)
- RE: PC audio IS mainstream audio. - Charles Hansen 11:31:41 01/31/09 (0)