[Audio Empire]

On Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:43:55 -0700, Robert Peirce wrote
(in article ):

I have been fascinated by the idea of music servers but unwilling to pay
the price. Then it occurred to me I already had the nucleus of a music
server in iTunes on my MacBook Pro. Adding a DroboS backup system gave
me all the space I needed and an Apple TV, with its optical output,
provided the way to pass the music to my DAC.

Folks have said that music played from an HD is superior to all but the
most expensive CD players. Let me say it isn't subtle.

I have a fairly good system but I never got into the $40,000 CD players.
I have used a DVD transport with optical output and that is pretty good,
but HD via optical really is superior.

I think the biggest thing I noticed was the sense of space. I was
listening to one recording made in a fairly large, open hall with which
I am familiar, and I could hear the hall and the instruments in it! I
had heard some of this sense of space from my previous system, but not
like this. Recordings made in booths and multi-tracked, sound that way.
It is quite amazing.

This kind of stuff isn't important to a lot of folks, and frankly, I can
listen through a lot of crap if I like the music, but if you have bad
CDs, you will really be able to tell. Unless you really like the music,
you may not want to listen to them anymore.

Your experience tallies with mine. I too use an AppleTV box connected to my
Mac Pro tower via 802.11n Wi-Fi. From the Apple TV box, I feed my outboard
DAC via TosLink. Using Apple Lossless Compression, and playing the music from
the AppleTV's HDD, I hear the same sense of space (well described, BTW) that
you are talking about and I agree that it is superior. I can switch between a
ripped CD on AppleTV and and the original CD itself played on my excellent
Sony XA777ES SACD player. When I switch to the AppleTV through my outboard
DAC, I hear the ambience on the recording "open up." Everything sounds more
palpably real. This is similar to what I hear when playing a 24/192 master
next to a Redbook CD made from that master. The difference is not all that
apparent on some types of music, but on stuff that *I* recorded, the high-res
playback sounds much more like my memory of the original space than does the
CD of the same performance/recording. I see people post here all the time
that CD is so perfect that there is simply no reason to record at anything
greater than 16/44.1. I say that people who maintain that opinion must not be
listening to or for the same things I'm listening to and for. Because if they
were, they'd hear the superiority of the high-resolution formats too.