A McIntosh of a Different Color

McIntosh Laboratory announced its $6000 MS750 music server on May 30. The second music server in McIntosh's line, the MS750 incorporates a 750GB hard drive and integrated Web interface capabilities. McIntosh estimates that the MS750 is capable of storing 2700 CDs at full resolution, or about 12,000 songs.

The MS750 also incorporates a CD transport to facilitate ripping CDs onto hard drive (not to mention burning playlists onto CD-R). The transport plays CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, MP3, WMA, and AAC formats. Free Lossless Audio Compression (FLAC) encoding and decoding eliminate the need for lossy compression while ensuring CD-quality storage.

A built-in Gracenote Internet-enabled music guide "allows for easy content management, with access to CD cover art." The MS750 also boasts a serial port and TCP/IP interface.

Knowing its audience, McIntosh also says it has made it simple to use the MS750 with a preamp or phono stage to rip LPs to the drive.

As I was ooohing and ahhing over the MS750 press release, John Atkinson commented that he'd spent some time playing with the MS300 during his visit to Binghamton last December. "It was well sorted," he said wistfully. "They got that one right." Sounds like the MS750 is more of the same, with the emphasis on "more."

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