[Steven Sullivan]

Greg Grainger wrote:
In article ,
Steven Sullivan wrote:
So, we'll see.

Have you considered moving to an all-hard disc playback system?
It would involve some tedium in transferring your CDS , but in the
end you gain fantastic amount of convenience and flexibility.

When I win the lottery, I'm going to buy a Sooloos.

As a matter of fact, I have been in the process of ripping all my CDs
to WAV files. Nearly done.

Trouble is, the wiring, D/A design and output circuitry in your average
computer are all vastly inferior to those in your average high-end stereo
system (mine, for example). Even plugging the sound card drectly into my
power amp would not get around the weaknesses in the transport and other
cicuits before the signal finally got outside the box.

My computer isn't ever doing the D/A (and the concerns about wiring and
transport(!) etc are IMO overblown). I've used USB, and wireless to
transmit the data to my AVR, which does the DA conversion. Currently I'm
using optical S/PDIF via a Creative Audigy 2ZS laptop PCMCIA card (which I
scored for $20 on ebay), because I've started ripping multichannel DTS and
Dolby Digital tracks and my USB/wireless can't transmit those.

Transmission is bit-perfect from my laptop (otherwise DD/DTS bitstreams
wouldn't work, and they do) and I'm outputting sample rates up to 96k kHz
with nominally 24 bit resolution. Player software is foobar2000
(freeware), which is massively user-configurable (though not exactly
user-friendly).

The main cost was for backup hard drives ( need about ~500Gb for all my
music + some space for more, at this point. ) And they're cheap nowadays.


--
-S
We have it in our power to begin the world over again - Thomas Paine