hard disk or optical drive

I know some of the members have a squeezebox... Also read some articles in Absolute sound discussing the sound of a hard drive vs your typical CD...(I believe they compared it to an Esoteric P-03....and compatible transport (I forget which is the transport - the P-03 or the other...). In any case - they said the hard disk sounded better. And to me - that makes some sense given the stability of a hard disk vs a cd transport....So - to the question --

Can any of you comment on the sound of your hard disk setups...relative costs with your DAC (if you want) - sound quality - difficulty of getting the music on them (I'm an idiot)....thx. tim.

I run a Squeezebox into a lower end DAC (soon to change, but for now a Musical Fidleity X-DAC) - my Marantz 8300 (through the DAC to keep it fair) sounds better to me - but it is close - darn close - close enough for me to use the Squeezebox for most of my listening - the Marantz only gets turned on these days for SACD playback or for serious redbook playback as the Marantz DAC is superior to the little X-DAC.

Ok - getting music on there - not so easy - especially if like me you use one comptuer to rip your music and another (in my case, a low-end desktop PC running Solaris) as your music server.

I guess the simplest way would be to use a Windows box as your music server running SlimServer and iTunes - then just configure SlimServer to serve up your iTunes library. In this case - probably quite easy. Certainly a lot easier than having to FTP files around as I do in my case.

Make sure you rip your music in "Apple Lossless" though - iTunes is preconfigured to use high compression AAC, so change that in the iTunes preferences the first thing you do.

Of course, the ripping process is tedious - especially if you want your tags to be correct and consistent. Eg. I've got a few funky/jazz albums by the *SAME* artist and for "Genre" I've seen it automatically display "Jazz", "Funk", "Acid Jazz", and would you believe it, "Pop". Manually changing all of this takes time - if you demand it to be correct.In other cases I get bands listed with and without "The" and with "and" and "&" used interchangably. Of course, this doesn't matter so much per se, but it is really annoying when you're trying to find a "Vika and Linda" album only to realise that particular album (unlike the rest of them) is listed under "Vika & Linda".

I have not spun a redbook CD in a transport for years.

All my CD's get ripped the instant they arrive.

Using a good digital interface on the PC or using a device like the Slimboxes is critical.

I feed a digital signal to my processor, so transport or PC DAC quality is a non-issue for me, as all my music is going trough the DAC's in the Meridian processor.

My current PC based output is an M-Audio FirweWire 410. Very solid, and great ASIO interfaces.
Playback is Foobar 2000, with upsampling to 88.2.

Convenience is good, but the new Slimbox duet is tempting me for it's slick UI on the remote.

As noted above, the biggest bear is the ripping and tagging process. But it’s a one time thing.

Sound quality of the EAC ripped data (which is guaranteed to be all there or at least as accurate as the rip report says it is) is excellent, as there are no dropouts in the source data.
But one must ensure that network, and playback chain is free of latency, jitter and other timing anomalies.

It seems we trade one set of challenges for another. But the disc based playback of Redbook data is very, very good when done right.