digital front end to rival best vinyl?

Nope.

a few months ago i did add a server, with 176/24 and 192/24 hirez files. they sound wonderful. much better than redbook.

but i likley prefer the best SACD's to the hirez PCM i've yet heard, let alone 'the best vinyl'.....which i have in my system. then there is 'the best reel to reel master tape, which beats the best vinyl.

i will qualify this by saying that my musical and sonic sensibilities highly value those aspects of music reproduction which are preserved by analog recording. i think live music sounds more like analog than digital (especially PCM). so if one values the added leading edge energy of PCM and don't have a problem with the reduced space and body with PCM.....then possibly digital could rival the best vinyl.

this is a subjective question; and i have friends i respect who prefer a digital hirez master to a RTR tape master. my ears tell me something different. and i know how the best of analog recordings make me feel compared to the best digital.

i do know what happens when i have friends over and we switch from listening to anything digital to Lps or RTR tape. we rarely if ever return to digital.

btw; i love digital and have top level digital gear.

You will have to do a lot of research to find a hard drive based system that works for you.

Here is a company offering hard drive front ends: sonore.us

I have not heard these products so I'm not recommending them, but it may be a place to start your search.

The best digital front end I have heard is the new Naim HDX. I felt it even outperformed the dCs Scarlatti by a significant margin. It is still not as good as a good vinyl front end (what is?) but it is awfully close. I plan to get one once the 2nd generation units come out.

The best I've heard is our PC driving a Playback Designs MPS-5. To top it off, it will accept a direct DSD signal via ST-optical. Hi-rez PCM and DSD.. can't get much better than that!

I think digital is certainly getting closer than it used to.

To be honest, with the current state of digital in my system (Weiss DAC2+Mac Mini), I would never get into analog from scratch at this point. I would even prefer the Weiss to all all my previous $3-5k tables (Michell, VPI, Rega). However with a record collection of 1300LPs collected over the last 18 years there is little chance I would give up analog anytime. And comparing my $10k+ setup there is still a slight edge to analog, even when running high-rez 24/176.4 files.