Hello, new guy here. I've had a passion for a/v since I could pronounce "Klipsch Heresy" which there were 3 pairs of in my living room growing up, coupled with some nice hardware such as a pair of Luxman M-02s, a Robertson Sixty-Ten, and a variety of nice preamps and c.d. players such as the Musical Fidelity A3. They all had their moments of critisism but they got me in the game. After the Heresy's were replaced with a full Paradigm reference V.2 setup and as I started to get older my system started to sprout, looking something like this...

Paradigm Monitor 11 V.5
Paradigm Studio Sub 12
Sony Str-DA3100ES (No HDMI)
My original fronts were a $20 pair of speakers from Good Will that I customized via tweeter arrangement and crossovers.
They weren't bad at all for the price:
Abstract Acoustics Signatures 2.1 by audiosphere.

I plan on getting the matching center and surrounds for my speakers as I thoroughly enjoy them, one day if I can afford it I'll be doing an all around overhaul but until then this works fantastic. It will even more so; I hope, if I can get my hands on a new Anthem MRX-700 or 900 to replace the Sony. I have an old Sony Trinitron XBR so I'm not too worried about video enhancment although I'm planning for it.

I use my system primarily for music, at least that's where it's performance matters to me the most.
My trouble is that I'm using an X-box 360 hard drive to store my music and I run it through Fiber Optics. I like the sound quality of my production c.d.'s yet I love the convience of selecting particular bands, songs, albums, or a random sequence of my vast library consisting of many different artists and genres. The X-box is good for this other than a lack in sound quality under certain if not many conditions and I'm looking for a solid replacment. Preferably something easy on the eyes, a nice amount of storage (250Gb or better would probably suffice) and good quality from c.d. upload to playing off the drive. An onscreen feature that would act much like an X-box would be excellent. In other words I'd like something easy to use, somewhat simple, and simply a good quality piece of equipment. FYI I'm not too worried about other zones and such features and probably won't be for quite some time.
Thank you for your time, I'm excited to be a part of Stereophile. I've been reading this magazine since I was a kid.

(P.s. if someone could tell me what kind of speakers are on the cover of the magazine at the top of the homepage I'd really appreciate it, they look nice.)