jlowe

Hi Chris, <br /> <br /> Thanks for another exciting episode in the series. I have a few questions to help me understand the incremental value between CA02 and CA03, and also also get a handle on music servers in general:<br /> <br /> * What specifically does the DA100 DAC give you over the UD-01? It seems to have lots more features, but is there a sound quality difference, and if so, what contributes to that?<br /> <br /> * Does the MyBook contain 2 separate physical 1TB drives? If so, when you say "The drives also appear as a single external hard drive to you", it seems that for all intents and purposes there is only one drive in use, with the other being exclusively backup. Is that what this means? Obviously I don't have any experience with RAID.<br /> <br /> * Let's say for the moment that I have the goal of having my music server sound as good as my current audio setup. Based on my current understanding, it would seem that I need to get a DAC of the same caliber or better than the one in my current CD player. Am I on track here? To rephrase the question: assuming iTunes bit-perfect output, is the DAC the only part of the digital chain that affects sound quality?<br /> <br /> -Jeff<br /> <br /> <br />

Hi Chris,<br /> <br /> Thanks again for this great series. Each episode adds one more piece to the puzzle, and eventually I expect to get the whole picture.<br /> <br /> I didn't understand some of the comments that referred to DAC bit rates (e.g. 24/96, 16/44.1), so I'm hoping that a future episode will fill in that piece of the puzzle for me.<br /> <br /> Again, really nice work.<br /> <br /> -Jeff<br /> <br />

I love shuffle mode, especially since I have very diverse tastes, as you seem to Chris. One of my favorite recent sequences was Blue Moon of Kentucky (Bill Monroe) followed by Warm Leatherette (Grace Jones). And they both hit the spot.

This has been the most helpful thing I've found on the web for understanding the essence of a music server. I'm looking forward to future articles in this series that build upon this. I'm very interested in seeing how typical real-world problems are addressed, for example, how would you serve up music from iTunes when the collection of music files is too large for a single disk?<br /> <br /> Again, thank you this approach. Please keep it going.<br /> <br /> -Jeff<br /> <br /> <br />