What Hirez Discs Have You Purchased Recently? (2 Viewers)

[Phil A]

I picked up the SACD of Joe Cocker's 'With A Little Help from my Friends.'

 

[Mike Frezon]

Just NOT in time for the holidays--well, there's always future holidays--I got this SACD in the mail today from Acoustic Sounds:

HERE'S the track listing. Technically, I guess this isn't a "Christmas Album Reissue" but it behaves in the classic sense of those great old compilation Christmas albums we all have enjoyed over the years.


It sounds great. I'll bet most of these tracks originated from Capitol Records. Those all sound beyond great. Those that weren't are across-the board in terms of fidelity.

 

[Mike Frezon]

Oh. And under the Christmas tree this year:

I recommend them both.


The Manilow tracks are a bit uneven in terms of fidelity. Some of those early 70s hits almost have a "wall of sound" effect to them...making it hard to distinguish instruments, chorus, etc. Those crescendos and key changes, don'tcha know! But they still sound the best I've ever heard them. In fact, seeing as how these songs were an important part of my adolescence--and I know them inside and out--it is a pleasure to hear them again sounding in tip top form.


The Hall and Oates is uniformly excellent.

 

[Vegas 1]

Recent purchase Nat King Cole A Christmas Song from Audio Fidelity SACD

 

[Phil A]

I have Air Supply 'The Definitive Collection' and Eric Clapton 'Behind the Sun' on SACD waiting to be played.

 

[Ruz-El]

Star Wars Ultimate Digital Collection. Not had time to load it up yet. found it for a heck of a bargain.

 

[Mike Frezon]

Star Wars Ultimate Digital Collection. Not had time to load it up yet. found it for a heck of a bargain.

Holdin' out on us, Russ?

 

[Ruz-El]

Holdin' out on us, Russ?

Not on purpose ha ha. Just busy listening to other stuff on my player.

 

[Oliver Ravencrest]

The Essential Daryl Hall & John Oates (2 discs)

I picked this one up because it has all the songs on Rock & Soul Part I plus Out Of Touch, Method Of Modern Love and more!

 

[Mike Frezon]

The Essential Daryl Hall & John Oates (2 discs)

I picked this one up because it has all the songs on Rock & Soul Part I plus Out Of Touch, Method Of Modern Love and more!

Is that an SACD? OR high-rez DL?

Do you have a link, Ron?

 

[Oliver Ravencrest]

Is that an SACD? OR high-rez DL?

Do you have a link, Ron?

http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Dar...eywords=the+essential+daryl+hall+&+john+oates

I think I missed the point on this thread. Sorry about that, it's a regular CD.

 

[Paul.S]

Another Mahler 3, this time Chailly and the Royal Concertgebouw on SA-CD. UMG announced this for Blu-ray Audio and then it never streeted.

Also got the Blu-ray Audio of Tom Petty's Damn the Torpedoes. I think I may have mentioned this before, but this title appears to be OOP not unlike Mojo before it. Fellow (high rez) Petty fans should keep an eye on Hypnotic Eye as it, too, may go OOP eventually.

 

[Phil A]

I bought a few hi-rez downloads - Herb Alpert's "Rise," Talk Talk's "The Colour of Spring" and Daniel Nicole's "Wolf Den."

 

[Paul.S]

Phil A, et al.:

I'm trying to avoid this rabbit hole but . . . Where do you put all your high rez downloads--an outboard HD? I can imagine myself very easily taking up a ton of space on my laptop with such DLs. So I'm kinda trying to think out how I would administer storage when/if I go that direction. I have my laptop in my bedroom, separate/away from my stereo/HT, and I'd like to keep it that way for visceral and practical reasons. I'm also not interested in a 'whole house audio' solution in my 1 bedroom apartment at this time. So I'm wondering if an iPad is the best solution to be looking towards in terms of a device/display via which to access all the content I may have stored on an external HD which is connected to my AVR . . .

 

[Phil A]

Paul, I've heard mixed use PCs (for audio and other things and) and right now I'm using HAL (Hollis Audio Labs) dedicated (Windows based) music servers (https://www.facebook.com/HollisAudioLabs/). When I lived in Northern VA, Rich Hollis was a couple of hours away and at one audio get together at my place he brought over a couple (I had one in the main system and one in the basement system that day). He also brought them over to other peoples houses who had mixed use PCs. That was probably around six years back when I was just starting to get into file playback and I finally got my PS3 to burn SACDs.

Since I have two music servers, I have (Oyen Digital) hard drives attached to each. I one one 4TB and one 3TB drive in each system (so one backs up the other) and I keep another copy on cheaper hard drives as I don't want to lose any music (have about 5TB). I recently acquired a Synology NAS unit with new Seagate (they have a 3 yr. warranty) 8TB (7 of which is usable after the operating stuff) and it is in RAID 1 configuration so one will back up the other. I just need a monitor to boot it up and then I use JRiver with JRemote (I've attached an old screen shot below of what it looks like - both on the screen and the App). I have both an iPad mini and also a cheapo Android tablet (I needed it anyway for the Oppo media control App for an older Oppo player where they don't have an IOS App) and I also have JRemote on my iPhone.

I recently upgraded both the music servers to Windows 10 (since I basically use one program). After I clean up several hundred files (on the NAS) where JRiver says the file name is too long, my ultimate goal is to get off the Windows platform in the main system and I'm thinking of an Aurender music server (which is pricey) which has a SSD hard drive to cache music files from the NAS (big files can have drop-outs depending on various factors including your network bandwidth). Aurender has its own App. So I'd still have 3 copies (I'm paranoid about losing stuff and right now on my plate of things to do is to try to recover files from a non-readable hard drive someone else gave me and he didn't back the files up).

For someone who doesn't want to spend tons of money, I'd recommend Windows 8 or 10 (they sound better than 7). Here are some examples - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883159638, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA2083MY7130, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883218054

JRiver is a $50 program and the JRemote App I believe is $10. One would get external hard drives (and don't forget to back-up) to store the music (if the PC doesn't have a high speed USB connection, usually these have a yellow border around them, get a powered drive). The PC and the tablet both connect to the network and then all one needs to do is sit back and select tunes.

 

[Phil A]

 

[Phil A]

Just to give one a perspective on how small the compact PCs are (my music servers are about 8 inches square and 2 inches high) below is a pic of the main system and next the the (2 channel) preamp (with HT Bypass) is the music server. The hard drives (with the music) are behind the center channel as is the power supply to the preamp.

 

[Paul.S]

Thanks, Phil, but you're in a higher orbit than I am on this. I'm just looking for a non-PC-based way to access content on an outboard HD. Can I not accomplish that via running iTunes on a iPad accessing the HD?

 

[Paul.S]

Two new SA-CDs:

Reiner & Chicago doing "Pictures At An Exhibition," "Night On Bald Mountain," some Borodin and other goodies on my second (and overdue) Living Stereo SA-CD purchase.

Randomly going through my Wish List, I found someone selling The Police's Ghost In the Machine SA-CD for $11. Clickety click.

 

[Mike Frezon]

Randomly going through my Wish List, I found someone selling The Police's Ghost In the Machine SA-CD for $11. Clickety click.

Ain't THAT a nice feeling?!?