Eric Tessmer

Firedog, Thank you for thorough reply and thoughts. Audio_ELF, Wappinghigh, thank you for you comments. A lot to consider and will probably have more questions later. Thanks again

Sorry for the ton of questions, but here it goes: 1. Can one make up a decent music server out of a PC, or does it make more sense to buy a dedicated server? I prefer to build my own so I can upgrade by moving my boards instead of buying a new server. 2. Would such a server have to be in another room, or can one make a silent server by using a fan-less PC and a solid state caching drive to play from (caching probably for a Raid-1 pair of 2TB spinning drives)? 3. Any reason I can’t continue to use my Entech 205-2 A/D converter? 4. Where does the optical output come from? I presume this would be some kind of daughterboard in the PC? Or, perhaps a more universal solution would be to use some kind of converter that’s USB in and optical out? That would have the advantage of being able to use future computers with a different buss. 5. Can this be done in Windows (Foobar?) without making a lot of compromises, or will I have to go to a Linux system? 6. What is the best open-source player for FLAC files on such a rig? 7. What’s the best software to rip to FLAC? Any help with these questions would be much appreciated. Thank you

Thanks for all the great information Someone mentioned that one big issue was that imperfections on CD/DVDs and CD/DVD buring HW can cause bad (lossless) data to be encoded. Is anyone familier with offset correction? Thanks

I am looking to use higher quality ripped format rather than standard MP3 or WMA and would appreciate help on the following questions: 1. Does Apple have a lossless music file solution? 2. Does Apple have audiophile-oriented products to manage or play lossless music files? 3. How does Apple compare to other lossless compressions like WMA or FLAC? 4. Does anyone else have a lossless music file solution? 5. Does anyone else have audiophile-oriented products to manage or play lossless music files? 6. Ballpark, how much larger than our MP3 files would a lossless music file be? 7. Would it be easy to down-convert from a lossless file format to MP3 for lower quality use on iPods? Thanks for the help.