Exactly my thoughts. What's the point of having such a huge collection of music stored locally in the DMP-A6? There are artists with only one big hit in their whole discography, so I prefer to pick only the single song over the whole album or even all albums of that artist. And I'll play that song for sure. My selection of the best music has about 1000 songs. Anything less than the best isn't good enough for me to waste my time listening to. On the other hand, I can understand the collecting mania. At one time, I used to buy complete series of manga books until I got to the point where I had nowhere to put them and couldn't read them at all.
Wow, I never imagined this group as the music police. Shades of Klaus from the WEF. "You will own nothing and you will be happy..." Perspective gents. How much music I have purchased over the decades and how I choose to store it is my business. I've been buying digital music since the CD became readily available in 1983 and vinyl and analogue tapes long before that. Before the availability of CD-ROM drives in PCs, I, like just about all my contemporaries played our CDs on CD players, MiniDisc and other formats like DAT and DCC on their respective decks. Then DVD-Audio and SACD came along and we played them on their players. From 1983 to today in 2024 (yes that's a lot of years) one can collect one hell of a lot of physical media. Yep, I have literally bookshelves and boxes full of them of discs and digital tapes. I consider myself a pretty organised person but believe me it becomes tedious trying to find a particular album let alone locating a specific piece of music to pay, so the obvious solution is rip those discs to a suitable file format and store them. Before I purchased the eversole DMP-A6 I stored all those files on my NAS and played them from a PC using software like Foobar2000 through an external DAC. Whilst this is all good and dandy booting up a PC, running a program, making sure the NAS is actually switched on and running is IMHO cumbersome compared to playing my music from my DMP-A6 which IMHO is a lot more convenient, feature packed and accessible in terms of finding the particular album, track, artist or genre I want to listen to. Plus it's a streamer that gives me access to stuff I don't have in my personal music library from the likes of Amazon Music, Radio Paradise, internet radio stations et al. Do I still play my CDs and digital tapes? Hell, yes. Not everything has been ripped and stored on the 4TB SSD inside the DMP-A6. About 4,500+ albums ripped so far and counting. DVD-Audio discs do contain video image content and sometimes I like to view that content too. Something the DMP-A6 doesn't support. One also needs to appreciate that Hi-Res multi-channel LPCM files can be pretty big so they do take up a lot of storage space on a SSD or HDD. Likewise DSD and SACD ISO files. So in my case, 4TB isn't probably going to be enough once I finish ripping the rest of my CDs and SACDs and converting the MiniDisc, DAT and DCC albums to LPCM for storage. So to address the question from @Inti Yes, I have at some time played all the music I own. Obviously since owning the DMP-A6 for less than a year I haven't had time to re-listen to every track on the DMP-A6 but if it (or I) lasts the distance I probably will. Perhaps when I'm bored out of my tiny I will digitise all my vinyl LPs, reel to reel tapes, cassettes and 8-track cartridges.
It's my music backup. What's the point of me ripping and encoding music if I only do 20%? Plus you may want a copy of lossless vorbis for portable use. Not having internal drive is missing a important feature, it's CD ripper /encoder, so the extra expense is worth it...but for sake of just 4TB? Ideally the analogue section should be removed, space inside for 3.5" bay cooled, and on silicon pads. Make it a server/ripping/ Plus 24 bit 192khz music is far bigger is size than 44khz 16 bit that 4TB will be eaten up pretty fast, if one HD album is about 1 GB each or so
What do you mean by "data integrity"? I've been using external USB hard drives for years connected to Oppo players USB inputs with no issues at all. I have the DMP-A6 connected to the USB-DAC input of my Marantz SA-KI Ruby with no issues as well.
I've had issues with some USB enclosures losing connection, at total random points. I'd rather not risk USB for mission critical data. Some bad experiences with Prolific USB chipsets in USB boxes.
I have four Western Digital external hard drives and have never had any of them lose connection with the connected component. Not sure what you mean by "mission critical data". Maybe the issue is with the USB "boxes" you're using and not the USB connection itself.
