Article: Computer Audiophile Pocket Server C.A.P.S. v3 Carbon

[roubaixpro]

Hi Chris,

 

I have a question regarding a statement you made in your CAPS v3 preview article below:

 

"My experience with several canned music servers such as Aurender, Sooloos, and Sonore to name a few has given me a good idea of what I and other computer audiophiles want in both performance and remote control. Given one of the goals is to design servers I will use in my system the CAPS v3 servers must compete with all the canned server options. I didn't design these servers for everyone else to use while I sit in an Ivory Tower listening to something else. I designed these servers for myself and all the CA readers."

 

One of your goals of CAPS v3 was no moving parts, which means no internal hard drives, yet all the canned server options that you mentioned above along with other ones from Olive, SOtM, Music Vault Diamond and Baetis Audio include one or even two spinning hard drives for storage and back-up using dBpoweramp. It seems that all these manufacturers have integrated internal spinning hard drives without compromising the sound quality.

 

I'm wondering if you think that these all-in-one music servers with internal storage are being compromised in terms of sound quality because they do have these spinning internal hard drives? You mentioned that additional storage such as extra SSD cards and spinning hard drives can be added to the Carbon server, but I would like to see a "reference design" with say 2 - 3TB hard drives (one for music storage and one as a back-up) and a 64GB SSD for the OS. That way, I could just purchase it canned from Small Green Computer, since I am not much into assembly or modding. I am most interested in the Aurender, but at $7k and with future planned models being even more expensive, it is out of my budget. I assume that a a good portion of the cost of the Aurender is due to it's proprietary OS.

 

BTW, Small Green Computer does not seem to be selling the Carbon model yet.