FYI - that is about 260 linear feet of heavy plastic. In the mid-2000s Stereophile reviewers began to claim, consistently, that a CD copied to a hard drive and played back with a decent DAC sounded better than the original disc. Remember that these are the folks who said that CDs sound better if you paint the edges of the CDs with a green marker, or elevate your interconnects on little wooden trestles. But sometimes they are right.
Loading CDs into my computer at the rate of 5 per hour, a rate that I cannot sustain for more than an hour or two, my collection would have taken 1256 hours, or about 6 years of 40-hour work weeks. That does not include the “grooming” (the most critical and time-consuming step). Fortunately I met Ari Margolis http://www.goldeneardigital.com 4 years ago. He has a robot that automatically copies CDs at a reasonable price that includes grooming. Fortunately for my sanity, Ari is an excellent musician with a deep knowledge of classical and jazz, and an audiophile (hence “Golden Ear Digital”) – also with a touch of OCD, a necessary job skill for his business. Even cooler, he can copy your SACDs into DSD files (your DAC has to be able to handle DSD, or they just hiss or get downgraded to PCM). Instead of buying duplicate high resolution downloads (and hi rez does sound better – not even a whisper of a doubt), for a fraction of the cost you can play your SACDs through your DAC.
Ari is a master at JRiver, which is an amazing program that just keeps getting better. He is always available to help and several times took over my computer remotely to help with setup. More important, he patiently taught me to do much of the personalizing of the JRiver system myself. His skill at setting up the interface and taming the unreliable CD meta-tagging is based not just on programming skills, but on his knowledge as a musician. He came to my home to listen to music over beer and cheese, and help me compare DACs. We settled on the relatively inexpensive Sonore ex/D, which I would never have found without his help – it sounds better than DACs costing 2-3 times more. I would never make a significant decision about my system without his input…even though I was awarded my own “golden ears” in 1959 when I built my first tube stereo electronics and speakers from schematics and parts trips to Akihabara.
