I purchased a cheap Chinese made integrated tube amp a few month back and this past weekend I hooked it up with the laptop using microsoft media center lossless format to copy some CDs. I was so surprised that the payback was quite stunning. Using my 80, the base was solid and went so deep that I think only submarine can reach further down yet the high and mid are extremely clear. I am think of getting a mega hard drive to record all my CDs,in this way, no more juggering between disks and a lot easier to maneuver between songs.
Any better suggestion is welcome.

Even if I could percieve the difference between my high bitrate mp3/wma's I would never, ever, (willingly) go back to using CD's. The convience of having all my music at my finger tips, searchable and presented in a very apealing looking setup is just way too good to give up.

If you are willing to invest in a few big hard drives then you would have the best of all worlds using the lossless technic of ripping music off your CDs.

It's not exactly all roses if you decide to do that. Try navigating 2000+ albums using Media Center, and you'll learn that it's not pleasant. Even search on large collections (where large is something greater than a couple hundred albums) of music is quite painfully slow.

If you're going to have a large collection of music using Media Center, my recommendation is to organize it hierarchically on the filesystem, and use something like Musical Folders.

i tunes pluss this


http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wo/1.RSLID?mco=96190CF2&nplm=M9470LL%2FA


apple>than any microsoft product, in my openion....

Makes for a somewhat hollow and weightless opinion when you follow that kind of thinking.

It is true MP10's (MCE uses it) database is not that great... but I have over 500 albums now in my MCE and its just fine on my HT P4 3Ghz. They have had some minor patches for this issue and the MCE dev team assures *us* that Vista MCE will have even better performance in this area.

I've tried a LOT of HTPC software from MythTV to Sage, to Beyond and MCE is by far my favorite. If Apple's work for you fine but iTunes = the devil to me so I haven't even considered their HTPC solution.

So far, I have ripped 200 cds into the my external hard drive and only used up less than 100 gig of capacity, I am extremely happy with the result. I can find the song either by album or by artist, I think is quite convenient. The most important of all is that I don't have to suffer the lost of CD quality.

CD "quality" is so relative IMO. By my own estimate I'd say more than 50% of CD's out there are mastered very poorly compared to what quality the CD is capable of preserving.

Agreed 100%. CDs can and do sound incredible but so many are just absolutely terrible.

Same goes for any format though, really.