Arcam Aim For Serious CD Quality With Media Squirting Hard-Drive

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]