14 DAY TRIAL // More music available on the market means higher demands as far as music playing devices are concerned. But simply adding more storage space to the players does not cover but for a part of the problem, whatsoever. As the new formats are getting more and more accurate and new connectivity standards emerge almost each month, the new gear must really be a "has-them-all" piece of engineering.
Sony is one name that represents the core of technical evolution by itself and it was no surprise that they recently came up with a stat-of-the-art music server meant to cover for most of your exigent demands in the home environment. The HDD NAC-HD1 is a digital music server with a rather impressive 250GB storage capacity yet sporting a CD player as well. In fact the HDD NAC-HD1 is Sony Giga Juke's bigger brother even if it no longer has speakers and looks quite different.
The new Sony server can stream music to other compatible devices via the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) standard so you can actually find a lot of uses in a lot of particular places and situations. The integrated hi-class AM/FM tuner can be of great help in getting the content you're interested in as it can be programmed to record certain stations at certain user-defined times.
The user will surely enjoy the 4.3" color LCD unit on the front of the HDD NAC-HD1 and the frontplate-access USB connector. Too bad that the Sony HDD NAC-HD1 does not have integrated Wi-Fi connectivity so you'll have to cover for this yourself if you want to go "networking".
This HDD music server will allow you to rip CDs with speeds up to 16X in Linear PCM, ATRAC or MP3 formats and it also sports a very convenient auto title-labeling system based on CDDB via Internet. It boasts a 2 x 85W amplifier which will surely be quite enough for a room, even for a very large one. As specced before, the 250GB storage allows you for around 125,000 songs when fully loaded (and you'll never get to listen to them all, no-never-whatsoever!)
The price for the Japanese market (the Sony HDD NAC-HD1 was already released there) is somewhere around $928 as reported. So far, the US release plans and prices are very-very unknown but hopefully Sony will soon announce the certain date for the European release, somewhere between late-spring and early-summer.