Worth Reading?
+3 [3 votes]
It’s a while until my birthday, but if I have any closet admirers out there you may want to start saving up for Arcam’s latest high-end home entertainment lump as I’d really rather like it. The FMJ MS250 Music Server has a 400GB hard-drive slapped inside a four-zone media player, capable of storing up to 640 uncompressed CDs or up to 4,800 compressed CDs.
So that it lives up to Arcam expectations, their engineers actually designed a custom soundcard with four Crystal CS4398 120dB dynamic range 24-bit stereo DACs. Front and rear mounted USB 2.0 ports add up to three in all, and there’s also a 10/100 ethernet socket for networking the whole thing up. That way you can use a large-screen interface to navigate music by genre, artist, track name or album. Oh, and there’s internet radio as well as the functionality to burn custom compilations of songs to a blank CD. It might all seem a tad overkill, such a complicated box for just CDs, but Arcam are, as ever, catering to a very specific market of audiophiles.
Hopefully those audiophiles will be willing to cough up the MS250’s £3,000 price tag ($6,032)
Arcam [via Pocket-lint]
Congratulations to Arcam on producing such a beautiful media player! I’d wish to see more storage capacity though. Hope the manufacturers will also make harddrives and cd drives upgradeable so we would finally have a player that lasts for a couple of years longer than average cd players.
From reading Arcam’s website on this baby… You can burn CD’s as well. Now, how high end is the CD player/burner? Most CD+RW’s in PC’s are relatively cheap and not that well constructed.
it’s also running windows XP, which you then have to deal with all the licensing problems and potential crashes. does it have auto update turned on/off? What happens when you get a virus while it’s on your network. Or, perhaps you connect a USB device to it and you end up killing the OS due to driver mismatch. How do you re-install the OS?
Most servers I’ve come across run either XP or Vista. My confidence in these OS’s makes me weary of using a device of this kind. I’d like to see a stripped down OS with minimum bells and whistles. But that’ll never happen.
Great idea, poorly executed. Sounds like a startup!
Oh, and what happens when MS no longer support XP?