Sony HAP-Z1ES Hi-Res Music Player RMAF 2013

I took a chance and opened my unit, removed the hard drive from it's cage and cloned it to an ssd.

Glad to report that the operation was a total success!

With regard to classification, I simply put the composer's name in the "Artist" section and the performers name in the "Album Artist" section

the drive got cloned on a windows 8 machine using "macrium reflect." It's a free download, but any cloning software should do the trick

once you download the "hdd audio remote" app on itunes, you just keep your finger on those fields and make any change you want. The hard drive on the HAP then recognizes the changes

I don't know the answer -

Seems to me that you can try that first and if it doesn't work, clone the drive as I did.

at minimum, there's certainly no degradation of the redbook spec. At it's best it's excellent, especially with regard to the bottom (at least on my system)

There's no front volume control. There are Sony amps(surround I guess)that can be controlled from the software you download from itunes

that's what happens when you put in an empty formatted drive rather than cloning the drive that came with the unit