The future is now with hi-fi that communicates wirelessly with your network.  Home Theater media players are nothing new, we’ve seen some very exotic pieces that will play your ripped CDs and DVDs right from your network catalogue to your TV.  It’ll be some time before the complete wi-fi home theater is an affordable reality.  But for now the first surprisingly affordable (but still a little up there at an MSRP of $1300).  Cambridge Audio has introduced its Azur 640H.

This little gem is built on its own high end CD player; but who wants a CD player nowadays?  This unit ensures you never have to use a CD player again.  It includes a built in 640G hard drive and its own proprietary “rip” method called AudioFile which stores your CDs locally, it can rip up to 300 AudioFile CDs that supposedly lose nothing from the original.  Alternatively you can store up to 3000 of your CDs using conventional lossy compression.  You can even play internet radio right off the Cambridge Audio 640H.

Granted, 160G is big but it’s not that big.  So the 640H can wirelessly communicate with your home network and play audio files stored outside.  This is huge for the HTPC users or someone who has yet to take the plunge and build an HTPC.  If you have a wireless router on your home network you can share to your 640H and it’ll play from your master library using its own menu system to select songs, playlists or randomizer.

How does this differ from any HTPC?  Why would someone with an HTPC even want something that does the same job the PC can do?  This is the $100 question.  And to take it a step further what’s the difference between this type of unit and the Xbox360, besides the disc space, 360 with a mere 20G.  The difference is in the playback device itself which will only be a concern if hi-fi quality audio is important.  For an audiophile there are many weaknesses in using a PC as a source, not the least of which is the noise generated within the box, even the finest quality HTPC is not an audiophile device.  Any all-in-one unit is lesser quality than any specialty device.  This is almost universally true in hi-fi and that’s largely because any time you house several processes and functions inside one box, on the other side of single power supply you literally have several processors muddying up the acoustical quality of the output signal.  The result is a flat acoustic texture.  As an (little a) audiophile who has been a longstanding fan of the Cambridge Audio line and their CD players I trust their equipment as reasonably priced rendition of the kind of stuff the really expensive big boys are making.

The Cambridge Audio 640H is made from CA’s own audiophile quality CD player, high end DACs, beefy power supply and all.  Even audio files accessed from across the network, while not as good as those originating from the unit itself, will benefit from the strength and signal purity of the 640H’s high caliber design.  So, playing MP3’s off the Xbox360 or any media extender PC or HTPC is simply not going to hold a candle to the acoustic quality of the Cambridge Audio 640H.