MP 7,1 Will you miss the optical drive?

[chrissomos]

I took the internal optical drives out in favor of hard drives. I use a $20 LG Blu Ray burner for optical media and it works like a charm.

 

[ssgbryan]

Music will be streaming 24bit 96KHz soon enough, so CDs won't really be able to deal with that anyway. HD CDs or Blu-ray music never caught on, so...

That is because there is no audible improvement - the CD specification covers the entire range of hearing.

 

[Slash-2CPU]

That is because there is no audible improvement - the CD specification covers the entire range of hearing.

...at 16 bits with a 44.1k sampling rate and no compression. Producing the correct frequency and precisely reproducing a sound are two very different concepts. If covering the whole range of human hearing was the only requirement, then all digital audio files would be mono at 48kbps.

For most equipment and most recorded music, you can't tell the difference between CD and any higher bitrate source. There's the problem of everything from microphone to recording studio to encoding to distribution format all the way to the end user's speaker must be of high enough quality that there is a difference. HD CD's and Blu Ray audio never took off because the market of consumers willing to spend $$$$ on that sort of equipment is tiny. It's about 10000% more convenient to buy it on iTunes and it sounds really good over a pair of $$$ headphones.

 

[flygbuss]

I have a cMP as media and Time Machine server. It got a DVD and a Blu-Ray drive installed. Whenever I need to read from or write to an optical disc on one of my machines I just use the shared drive feature. It works pretty good. Though to be honest it doesn’t happen very often.

 

[flygbuss]

...at 16 bits with a 44.1k sampling rate and no compression. Producing the correct frequency and precisely reproducing a sound are two very different concepts. If covering the whole range of human hearing was the only requirement, then all digital audio files would be mono at 48kbps.

For most equipment and most recorded music, you can't tell the difference between CD and any higher bitrate source. There's the problem of everything from microphone to recording studio to encoding to distribution format all the way to the end user's speaker must be of high enough quality that there is a difference. HD CD's and Blu Ray audio never took off because the market of consumers willing to spend $$$$ on that sort of equipment is tiny. It's about 10000% more convenient to buy it on iTunes and it sounds really good over a pair of $$$ headphones.

Exactly. It’s about imaging or reproducing the original signal. And it’s not only about what’s captured within the the frame of 16 bit and 44100 Hz. It’s also about how everything outside this coverage is handled / converted.
Most people prefer convenience over raw sound quality. Kids listen to their favorite songs via their smartphones or little boom boxes. The majority doesn’t wanna pay a little fortune in preamps and speakers or headphones, especially not on the go. That’s way SACD or the PonoPlayer haven’t been that successfull.