Or just incompetent hacks? Tasked with covering the expanding audiophile music server sector, they each reveal an alarming cluelessness. These old dogs can't seem to learn a new trick, except for the one being pulled on the readers of their columns.
Apple fanboy Steven Stone can't get his mind around the idea that RIPPING a CD is not the same as BURNING a CD: "The Music Vault allows you to burn CDs directly into a music library." No, that wasn't a typo, because he repeats the gaffe a few sentences later: "...the Music Vault offers a clever way to burn, store, and access your entire digital music library." He seems oblivious to the fact that such devices have been around for at least 9 years and there's nothing especially "clever" about ripping a CD. Nor does he pick up on the idea that this $1500 Music Vault is nothing but a $500 PC in a different case. (Note to Steven: the term "burn" refers to the use of a (insert Dr Evil voice) "la-ser". A small "la-ser" burns tiny pits into the substrate layer of a blank disc. Hard drives are magnetic recording devices and no "burning" is involved in storage or retrieval.) Stone reveals his Apple bias in another piece about Channel D Software: "The limitations to the software are that it only works on a Mac (grin)..." Why does he think software unusable on 90% of computer systems is something to grin about? Idiot. Robert Harley then shows that mastery of 2nd grade math continues to elude him. In a discussion of the PS Audio Perfect Wave transport he says, "The transport has 64GB of RAM on-board, enough to store 4 minutes of music. Very close, Robert. You only missed by a factor of 1000. The correct number was 64MB. The $2000 Perfect Wave seems to be little more than an ordinary DVD-ROM drive, plus a small LCD touchscreen interface. It has no storage of its own, requiring a NAS for local storage. You will also need to connect the Perfect Wave to the internet if you want your files to include any meta-data. Still, PS Audio will offer a ripping service in which you can mail them your CD collection and they will mail you back a hard drive full of ripped files...essentially making the Perfect Wave transport obsolete. Nice. I'm still waiting for one of these nifty new music servers to offer something that a $300 PC can't do. I guess it'll be a long wait. Slim Devices' philosophy of separating the audio playback hardware from the cheap commodity PC hardware continues to be the more elegant, practical, and economical solution. Meanwhile, the "audio industry" plods into the computer age, continually repackaging variations on the 1999 ARQ1 while Famous Audio Journalists steadfastly fail to notice the scam. -- Pale Blue Ego ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pale Blue Ego's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=110 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=57441 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
