As long as I've known a particular friend he has always had his music on hard drive. He seems to be constantly changing and upgrading things in his system. I was over there today and he had switched from JRiver to Roon. He also had HQ loaded on. So we listen to a couple tracks, then he turns off some filtering and upsampling, in my opinion things got better then, more dynamics and like a slight vale had been lifted, although it was good before, this is in comparison. Then he switches to HQ. The difference here was subtle, I suppose especially to an average listener, however, I still preferred the Roon native setting. I noticed on HQ a shaker was less natural, more like a sound effect, and an acoustic guitar sounded more like a student guitar opposed to the nice full sound I heard from Roon.

Do you all get free trial versions of this software? I always said the source is important, yet this whole software thing seems complex and easy to make a good system sound not so good, or at least not up to it's potential by using the wrong software, and then the wrong set up. I thought picking an analog rig was challenging, I don't even want to think about trying this hard drive thing.