Pssst, letting you in on a little secret: You Don't Need a CD Player!

People are constantly asking for advice in these forums about what CD player to get. I understand lots of people really want the particular functionality of a CD player, but a lot of people don't realize this point:

If you put your music on a computer, you can get far better sound quality and convenience at a fraction of the price! For anyone shopping for CD players, you *really* ought to consider this option.

I honestly can't remember the last time I powered up my CD player. I'll never go back. It's completely outdated.

I suppose this thread is more apropos to the computer audio section, but hardly anyone reads it -- particularly someone who doesn't yet realize they can completely bypass the CD player altogether.

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Originally Posted by Mike Anderson

People are constantly asking for advice in these forums about what CD player to get. I understand lots of people really want the particular functionality of a CD player, but a lot of people don't realize this point:

If you put your music on a computer, you can get far better sound quality and convenience at a fraction of the price! For anyone shopping for CD players, you *really* ought to consider this option.

I honestly can't remember the last time I powered up my CD player. I'll never go back. It's completely outdated.

I suppose this thread is more apropos to the computer audio section, but hardly anyone reads it -- particularly someone who doesn't yet realize they can completely bypass the CD player altogether.

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Of course I totally agree. Really, I'm looking forward to the day when all functionality except final amplification is handed by standard computers and sound cards.

And that day is already here for people with the interest and expertise to pull together such a system. The foobar program has plug-ins that will handle crossovers and equalization and also interface with suitable, multichannel sound cards. I just lack the time and patience to get into this, but more integrated, simpler to uses software will eventually come about.

But wait!! Why isn't it here already? Simple: the high-end business model is to sell the audiophile expensive, high mark-up hardware. And audiophiles remain equipment aficionados in general. :arf:

I just bought 2 new soundcards for my new and old PC's....hooked em' up briefly, but I have to admit, they sound pretty darn good...and that's just WMA and MP3 and decent bit rates. I tried this a few years ago, maybe 2001 or so back and it was pretty terrible. So I don't know if the MP3 and WMA compression algorithm improvments have been that dramatic, or the soundcards are just way, better (I suspect both)...it's at least as good as XM radio or whatever.

Haven't actually tried a CD in them yet, so I can't comment on that, but I expect they'd sound more than good enough for most people.

I'm in agreement...as compression techniques continue to improve, higher rez formats emerge, and storage capacity grows, the home PC is definitely going to becom a piece of the audio rig.

Interesting. How do you remotely control it from the couch?

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Originally Posted by kexodusc

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Haven't actually tried a CD in them yet, so I can't comment on that, but I expect they'd sound more than good enough for most people.

I'm in agreement...as compression techniques continue to improve, higher rez formats emerge, and storage capacity grows, the home PC is definitely going to becom a piece of the audio rig.

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Kex, m'man, no need to wait for improvements. It's all here, now. I really can't tell the difference between Apple Lossless played on iTunes throught my M-Audio Audiophile USB, and the real thing thru my CDP. (Granted, no part of my system is really high-end.)

And there's nothing to keep a person from using WAV format files, the native CD format; a 300 GB hard disk costs $120 and will hold >400 CD-equivalents in that format.

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Originally Posted by N. Abstentia

Interesting. How do you remotely control it from the couch?

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My laptop running iTunes sits, you guessed it, on my lap or be side me. It's connected to a USB hub using a 15' cable that is connected to my Audiophile USB and 200 GB hard disk holding my music files; they are located with the rest of my system. Gads! couldn't be easier or simpler.

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Originally Posted by N. Abstentia

Interesting. How do you remotely control it from the couch?

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That's the only drawback in the setup I'm putting together...But realistically, my receiver's remote controls the volume etc, and track flipping/disc switching aren't something I'd do if I'm running off the PC anyway. For some that will matter, not so much me. I usually listen to albums, not songs - for albums, I'll use my cd player, but for the times I do just want music in the house I'll use the computer. Then it's more for background music in the house, so I just set it on a playlist and use the random feature...

In my setup, the computer will output to the TV, and I'll have my wireless mouse near the couch actually...guess that's as close as I can get it. I'm sure someone will invent a remote setup for soundcards etc, if there isn't one already.

I am sorry, but this is silly. Maybe in a sub 400$ range, but a good dedicated CD player will run circles around a computer setup. Even if you dont compress it!

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Originally Posted by Florian

I am sorry, but this is silly. Maybe in a sub 400$ range, but a good dedicated CD player will run circles around a computer setup. Even if you dont compress it!

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If you use a digital output to a quality DAC, how so?

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Originally Posted by kexodusc

If you use a digital output to a quality DAC, how so?

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First its the ripping which you will loose information on. Then the encoding, and the Jitter thats not removed. You can hear certain section of the electronics inside the computer or the laptop through the sound card and you have voltage fluctuations.

There is most likely a whole range for and against it, but the simple fact is that you can hear it. We ran music from a Apple Ibook to a TagMcLaren Preamp here and while it was practical it did suffer in resolution, harmonic correctness and texture. Now given, you could possibly hear it on the Maggies, but it will be very obvious on Apogees, Magnepans and Electrostatics.

-Flo

PS: I am willing to do a blind test!

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Originally Posted by Florian

First its the ripping which you will loose information on. Then the encoding, and the Jitter thats not removed. You can hear certain section of the electronics inside the computer or the laptop through the sound card and you have voltage fluctuations.

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Very interesting...
For any compressed format there always will be some loss of sound quality for sure...but I have absolutely no degradation due to voltage fluctuations or other other electronics interfering with the transport of digital data to my DAC. I can only assume my M-Audio card protects against it then?
I've never tried it, but one would think if the CD player reads the data and it's properly transmitted to a DAC by the computer, it would be doing the same job a CD player does.
Jitter would be a concern, but even the most expensive Krell or ARC players I've heard didn't completely solve this...$18,000 DACs aside. - as long as crystals continue to be piezoelectic jitter will exist. Half the time the circuitry designed to eliminate jitter does more bad than good anyway...I'm usually so into the music that I never really notice any jitter effects except on the worst CD players. Same with pops or crackles on my turn table. Until they make a perfect format there's always gonna be something.

Anyway, as far as using a PC goes...I think it's coming - it may or may not be the best sounding - but then, there will be audiophile companies that try to address that someday too.
I certainly wouldn't expect my PC to play CD's as well as my Arcam, but as I said, I'm usually just using it as a programmable DJ for parties or for background music...it's not even hooked up to my stereo system, just my HT. Most people won't even own a $2000 system, so using their PC probably makes sense to them. It's gonna be handy in my case, I only have 2 CD players and 5 rooms with speakers in them in my house.

I think its a great choice for many people and encourage the IT Technology growing togehter with Audio and HT system. But i also heard some CD Transports that "only read 0 and 1's" with staggering differences! For most its great but i think that this is highly system and resolution dependand.

For instance the Tact users (room correction) upgrade the voltage regulation on their DSP chips and get a big improvement in the sound. So there are affects but you will not hear them on moderate systems.

So i recommend it, but i would be VERY carefull givin it a A+ for those addicted to audio at a certain level.

-Flo

Computers and A/V are seperate in my home. Why somebody would watch a movie on the computer or use it as part of a home theather is by me. Guess i'm old school when it come to this.

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Originally Posted by N. Abstentia

Interesting. How do you remotely control it from the couch?

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With this thing:

http://www.slimdevices.com/index.html

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Originally Posted by Florian

First its the ripping which you will loose information on. Then the encoding, and the Jitter thats not removed. You can hear certain section of the electronics inside the computer or the laptop through the sound card and you have voltage fluctuations.

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I'm sorry Florian, but you're dead wrong about this:

1) Ripping: Using a program like Exact Audio Copy, you can get completely error-free rips out of 99.99% of the CDs you buy. Perhaps 1 in 1,000 is damaged to the point where you get an error.

2) Encoding and computer electronics: I'm not sure what you're talking about re encoding (if you mean compression, you can rip w/lossless compression), but if you use an off-board DAC you can move the whole process off the computer. The computer than serves as storage, and as a means to manage your collection.

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Originally Posted by Florian

There is most likely a whole range for and against it, but the simple fact is that you can hear it. We ran music from a Apple Ibook to a TagMcLaren Preamp here and while it was practical it did suffer in resolution, harmonic correctness and texture.

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With that kind of setup, absolutely you will hear it. But come listen to mine, where I stream a pure digital signal to a hign-quality DAC that's sitting far away from the computer.

Sorry Flo, you're behind the times on this one.

You know i like you Mike, so i wont get upfront with this. Your Maggies are a great start and so is the Pathos, but you wont hear the difference. Its simply a lack of resolution!

I wont get into this, and i will not argue. I am, once again comparing two different realms of HIFI. If this works for you, thats fine but i can blindly say that E-Stat, Joe, Bernd, Y-S and myself would never do this because of the lack of resolution, downward dynamic range, and none-harmonic correctness that we can hear on our systems.

-Flo

PS: As a designer of Phase Changed cooled computers, watercooled multiprocessor systems i am right in the time, but my level of musical fideliy along with others wont allow us such toys-

Here's my setup, BTW:

1) Music is all stored in lossless format (FLAC) on a 500-GB external drive.

2) The music can be managed with any number of software setups (like iTunes, if you aren't using FLAC), but I'm OK using the Slimserver software that comes free with the Squeezebox I linked to above. That can be accessed from any computer that's on the network, or you can use a remote control to control it through the Squeezebox. You can have any number of these things throughout your house, hooked wirelessly to your network if you like.

3) The computer sends a network signal to the Squeezebox, which outputs a 44.1/16 bit PCM stream to a DAC. My Squeezebox is hooked to the computer via CAT5 cable, but wireless is also an option.

4) In my case, I'm using a Benchmark DAC1, which puts jitter at a below-audible level. Of course this makes the setup slightly more expensive, but then I'm getting sound quality that will rival a CD player many times more expensive than this.

5) The Benchmark outputs the analog signal to my Pathos Logos amp via balanced XLR cables.

That's it! I can control my music without touching a computer, via the Squeezebox. Or, I can use the laptop that's often sitting right in my lap, if I prefer.

The other nice part about it is that the Squeezebox makes Internet radio extremely convenient. You can even access it without having your computer on, via the Squeezenetwork. And through this setup, Internet radio actually sounds pretty good (about as good as you can make a 128k signal sound, which is good enough to fool most people).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Florian

You know i like you Mike, so i wont get upfront with this. Your Maggies are a great start and so is the Pathos, but you wont hear the difference. Its simply a lack of resolution!

I wont get into this, and i will not argue. I am, once again comparing two different realms of HIFI. If this works for you, thats fine but i can blindly say that E-Stat, Joe, Bernd, Y-S and myself would never do this because of the lack of resolution, downward dynamic range, and none-harmonic correctness that we can hear on our systems.

-Flo

PS: As a designer of Phase Changed cooled computers, watercooled multiprocessor systems i am right in the time, but my level of musical fideliy along with others wont allow us such toys-

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Have you listened to a computer setup with an offboard DAC?

I fully agree that if you just take the sound signal out of a laptop, it's going to suffer big time. But in my case, the analog signal is coming not from the computer, but a Benchmark DAC1. And you can make your DAC as fancy as you like.

Thus the computer is not acting as a sound signal generator, it's merely a storage and management device. My Squeezebox is acting as a "transport", and the DAC deals with any jitter problems.

Re ripping CDs, here is Exact Audio Copy, which will give you error-free rips on the vast majority of CDs:

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

Here's info on the jitter level of the Benchmark DAC1:

http://www.benchmarkmedia.com/dac1/

I seriously doubt even the most golden ears listening to the world's best setup can here the level of jitter this thing puts out. It simply isn't an issue.

Hi Mike,
When I first read your post this morning I thought it was a wind-up, but it turned into a debate. So here are my 2cts.
My wife bought last week an i-pod Nano to use on her long car journeys and got bitten by the PC jukebox bug. So out we went and bought an offboard DAC "Perreaux Silhoutte SXD".
It sounds acceptable through the living room system. We then made an experiment and took the PC into the listening room and have the DAC run through the Main System. Believe me the sound is nowhere near as good with the PC in the chain. We then used the CDP as transport only and the sound was a lot better.
Just my findings as of yesterday.
We all like different presentations and have different expectations.

Peace

Bernd:16:

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Originally Posted by Bernd

Hi Mike,
When I first read your post this morning I thought it was a wind-up, but it turned into a debate. So here are my 2cts.
My wife bought last week an i-pod Nano to use on her long car journeys and got bitten by the PC jukebox bug. So out we went and bought an offboard DAC "Perreaux Silhoutte SXD".
It sounds acceptable through the living room system. We then made an experiment and took the PC into the listening room and have the DAC run through the Main System. Believe me the sound is nowhere near as good with the PC in the chain. We then used the CDP as transport only and the sound was a lot better.
Just my findings as of yesterday.
We all like different presentations and have different expectations.

Peace

Bernd:16:

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1) What's the source for your digital signal? If it's the computer's internal soundcard, you can easily do better. My Squeezebox puts out a digital signal with inaudible jitter (in the double-digit picosecond range).

2) It's best not to put the PC in the room where you do your listening, because the noise from the PC itself (fan etc) will corrupt your listening experience. Note that you can easily run 50 feet of CAT5 cable before you have a problem with network signal, or you can stream wirelessly to something like the Squeezebox.

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Originally Posted by Mike Anderson

1) What's the source for your digital signal? If it's the computer's internal soundcard, you can easily do better. My Squeezebox puts out a digital signal with inaudible jitter (in the double-digit picosecond range).

2) It's best not to put the PC in the room where you do your listening, because the noise from the PC itself (fan etc) will corrupt your listening experience. Note that you can easily run 50 feet of CAT5 cable before you have a problem with network signal, or you can stream wirelessly to something like the Squeezebox.

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Mike, I am not a PC techno guy, so can't really answer your questions with knowledge. We used the PC from its usb port. We didn't have the machine in the room as the usb lead is long enough to reach the Living room but not quite the Listening room. We just needed to move it a little closer.
How is everything with you? Hope you're doing well.

Peace

Bernd:16:

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Originally Posted by Bernd

Mike, I am not a PC techno guy, so can't really answer your questions with knowledge. We used the PC from its usb port. We didn't have the machine in the room as the usb lead is long enough to reach the Living room but not quiet the Listening room. We just needed to move it a little closer.
How is everything with you? Hope you're doing well.

Peace

Bernd:16:

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Everything's great here, thanks -- still enjoying your tubes in my amp!

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Originally Posted by Mike Anderson

Here's my setup, BTW:
...

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Mine is really simple & managable ...

http://gallery.audioreview.com/showp...sort=1&cat=all

The M-Audio Audiophile USB:

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Originally Posted by Florian

First its the ripping which you will loose information on. Then the encoding, and the Jitter thats not removed. You can hear certain section of the electronics inside the computer or the laptop through the sound card and you have voltage fluctuations.

...!

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If you are concerned about exact, jitter-free copies, use Exact Copy ...

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

Reputedly, external USB-connected sound cards such as I use, reduce the effect of EMI/RFI found inside the computer.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bernd

Hi Mike,
When I first read your post this morning I thought it was a wind-up, but it turned into a debate. So here are my 2cts.
My wife bought last week an i-pod Nano to use on her long car journeys and got bitten by the PC jukebox bug. So out we went and bought an offboard DAC "Perreaux Silhoutte SXD".
....

Peace

Bernd

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Bernd, at what resolution is your wife's music encoded?

I'll be the first to agree that compressed formats aren't nearly as good as lossless formats: there is a "huge" loss of resolution and transparency.

There is one exception to this that I am aware of, that is copy protected cd's. Fortunately I only have a few, but if you burn a copy to a cd-r and I assume tranfer to PC you won't get the sound quality that is on the original cd. I found this out the other day, I was playing a burned copy and it had some skips that was annoying me to the point that I pulled out the original cd. I was immediately aware of how much better this cd sounded then the cd-r. So with some copy protected cd's you have to play them in a standalone cd player.

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Originally Posted by shokhead

Computers and A/V are seperate in my home. Why somebody would watch a movie on the computer or use it as part of a home theather is by me. Guess i'm old school when it come to this.

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Shokhead I guess I am very old school. Two channel stereo in the living room, TV in the bedroom and my computer will have nothing to do with either one.

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Originally Posted by Bernd

My wife bought last week an i-pod Nano to use on her long car journeys and got bitten by the PC jukebox bug. So out we went and bought an offboard DAC "Perreaux Silhoutte SXD".

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Bernd,

If this is the product:

http://www.perreaux.com/product.php?idp=52

Then yes, you are doing the encoding and digital-to-analog conversion offboard. That will sound much better than taking the audio right out of your computer's sound card.

However, I see that unit uses 24-bit Burr-Brown DACs. Those are OK, but at EUR 999, the unit is *way* overpriced for what it does. You can get the same 24-bit Burr-Brown DACs in the Squeezebox for $250 USD. You can't plug your CD player into it, but you get way more functionality with the remote control access to all your music, Internet radio etc.

See if you can return the Perreaux. For the kind of money you're spending, you'd be much better off getting a much higher quality DAC like the Benchmark.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mike Anderson

Have you listened to a computer setup with an offboard DAC?

I fully agree that if you just take the sound signal out of a laptop, it's going to suffer big time. But in my case, the analog signal is coming not from the computer, but a Benchmark DAC1. And you can make your DAC as fancy as you like.

Thus the computer is not acting as a sound signal generator, it's merely a storage and management device. My Squeezebox is acting as a "transport", and the DAC deals with any jitter problems.

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You know that there are certain equipment snobs who will never admit that a lower cost solution will approach -- or maybe exceed -- a high-cost solution. Don't bother them with facts, their minds are made up.
:sleep:

^^^ That's OK, he's entitled to his opinion too.

FWIW, there are an awful lot of "equipment snobs" who are going the way of the computer. Check out the Squeezebox forums, there are some very serious audiophiles, as well as some extremely knowledgeable engineers there:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/

Look at some of the setups folks are using (including Apogees):

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...ghlight=apogee

You'd have to use a pc dedicated for music, which is more expensive than a cd player. Any that is used for other purposes will become fragmented and might hurt your listening experience by skipping or fluctuations of other processes (windows!). Not only would you need a hard drive, but a good sound card as well and those add up to the price. I do believe the cd player is outdated, but I hope we'll some day get a lot of dedicated music servers on the market... like hifi audiophile iPods. I know Cambridge has one, but $1200 for a 160Gb hard disk player is a rip-off. You could buy 10 160 Gb hard drives and still have money left to buy a pc to put the components in.

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Originally Posted by PHiX

You'd have to use a pc dedicated for music, which is more expensive than a cd player. Any that is used for other purposes will become fragmented and might hurt your listening experience by skipping or fluctuations of other processes (windows!). Not only would you need a hard drive, but a good sound card as well and those add up to the price. I do believe the cd player is outdated, but I hope we'll some day get a lot of dedicated music servers on the market... like hifi audiophile iPods. I know Cambridge has one, but $1200 for a 160Gb hard disk player is a rip-off. You could buy 10 160 Gb hard drives and still have money left to buy a pc to put the components in.

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I don't use a dedicated PC, I just used what I already had sitting around, which is the same computer we use to do everything else. It simply doesn't require that much memory to run the music server software.

I don't use the sound card either, all the encoding and conversion is done offboard.

I did get an external hard drive, but those aren't that expensive these days, and it isn't necessary unless your present hard drive isn't large enough to accomodate your collection.

Note: I have nearly 8,000 "songs" (many of which are really radio show segments running up to an hour), and 99% of it is in FLAC (lossless compression, about half the size of redbook CD file sizes). It's still not a problem for my PC.

Why do so many who come to audio through their interest in computers want to get rid of CD's and other tangible sources? It reminds me of the introduction of CD's. That was a wonderful time for me. I was not happy with “perfect sound forever” from the beginning. As an early adopter I bought a CD player when they were all in the kilobuck price range. To all those wonderful people who sold their vinyl I thank you again. If I'm lucky I'll be able to get a mountain of CD's as people start ripping them to HD (hard drives). There is a high convenience factor associated with putting one's music on a music server. There is also a very high risk factor that most ignore or forget about. Hard drives are not in any way reliable. The reason servers use RAID arrays is because we who work with them know that hard drives die with no warning. The raid array stripes data across several drives so that when a drive failure occurs, and it will, the dead drive can be swapped out and the missing data reconstructed on the fly. I have no idea how this would work with music or even if it can. Don't get me wrong. I have been working at integrating my audio and video since 1967 when I bought a Pioneer TVX-95 TV audio tuner. It allowed me to have TV audio through my stereo. This was way before stereo TV and VCR's.

When I bought an IBM PC they came with 360K floppy drives and had no sound. I have been in the vanguard of computer audio from the beginning starting with the old AdLib sound cards. Even now My main PC is connected to my stereo. I rip LP's to be burned on CD and output Pandora to my stereo when I'm feeling lazy. I agree that the idea of having a personal jukebox that plays what you want is very nice. One problem for me is spending the time ripping 1000+ CD's to hard drive. The other problem is the sheer size of the files. Any kind of audio compression other than lossless is not for me. Of course there is the remote control thing and I need the exercise I get changing the LP or CD anyway. I would guess that using an outboard DAC would remove any question of sound quality. The thing to remember is whatever you do, don't get rid of your CD's because one day that hard drive will crash taking all of your data (music) with it. The larger hard drives are the ones on the bleeding edge of technology and they are the ones most liable to crash. Unfortunately the larger hard drives are the ones folks with large music collections need to rip their CD's to.:cool:

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Originally Posted by JoeE SP9

Why do so many who come to audio through their interest in computers want to get rid of CD's and other tangible sources?

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1) As I started out saying in this thread, the quality for the $ is much higher, if you go about it the right way;

2) You say "convenience", I say "power"! I can play any song out of my huge collection instantly, without getting out of my chair. I can build playlists for parties. I can randomly generate playlists, or play only one genre, or one year. I can search through my collection instantaneously for any song/artist/album/whatever.

And because I can play songs randomly, I often hear songs I haven't heard in a long time, and wouldn't have heard if I had to use the CD player, because it simply wouldn't have occurred to me to go find the CD and put it in the player.

It's just... COOL! :5:

Really, at some point you have to admit that "convenience" goes far beyond the meaning of that word.

You wouldn't believe how people react to my system when they see it in operation. They're wordless -- not just at the sound quality (which also blows them away), but the sheer *power* of it. I say "name your favorite group" and about five seconds later it's playing!

I've also had people thank me very heartily after I convinced them to buy a Squeezebox.

As far as hard drive failure: after I rip a dozen or so CDs in FLAC and have them all properly tagged (another feature you don't get with CDs), I back them up on an archive-quality DVD that will last a lot longer than any hard drive I'll ever own.

Very interesting thread with a lot to think about. With the growth in distributed music servers, I never really thought much of it simply because those devices have only been feasible by converting and compressing the music files due to their comparatively limited storage space.

Now that 500 GB SATA drives are going for less than $200, you're probably right that the time has arrived to start thinking of the computer as a viable music storage and management system, because with that amount of storage, it's now possible to store a large music collection using lossless encoding. I'd be curious as to how this would work with a wireless network because my desktop computer is nowhere near my audio system, and if I have to run CAT5 cabling then I'd rather stick with loading up my CD changer. For one thing, I already own a CD player and keep my CD collection in the same room with my audio system.

I know that the market is headed towards greater convergence between the PC and home entertainment worlds, but the thing that I like about having a standalone audio system is the simplicity and reliability. A CD player or a receiver will simply power up and you're ready to go -- no operating system to go through, no network security patches, no blue screens, etc. And as Joe already mentioned, if a hard drive goes kaput, there goes the music collection (and RAID or other backup configurations add cost). If you have the CDs in your collection, you don't have to worry about losing your music if the CD player breaks, or re-encoding everything if the hard drive fails.

The other factor that would keep me from getting rid of my CD player altogether is that I play SACDs, which have copy protection. Someone else already mentioned the copy protection schemes built into some CDs that prevent them from playing on CD-ROM drives.

Still though, you're bringing up some good points and a lot of ideas that I hadn't thought about yet. The weak link with sound cards has always been the analog circuitry, and using an external DAC gets around this issue.

Well, I don't have much to add to this particular thread other than this...

At least CD players don't get viruses like a PC....Apple for me all the way, but never for serious music playback.

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Originally Posted by Mike Anderson

Bernd,

If this is the product:

http://www.perreaux.com/product.php?idp=52

Then yes, you are doing the encoding and digital-to-analog conversion offboard. That will sound much better than taking the audio right out of your computer's sound card.

However, I see that unit uses 24-bit Burr-Brown DACs. Those are OK, but at EUR 999, the unit is *way* overpriced for what it does. You can get the same 24-bit Burr-Brown DACs in the Squeezebox for $250 USD. You can't plug your CD player into it, but you get way more functionality with the remote control access to all your music, Internet radio etc.

See if you can return the Perreaux. For the kind of money you're spending, you'd be much better off getting a much higher quality DAC like the Benchmark.

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Jep, that's the one. And I have no doubt that there are better units out there, but as my wife bought this (because it looks nice) I doubt that it will be returned.
As for me if it keeps her happy I am good with that. As I have no desire to put a PC into my listening chain.
Thanks for the tips though and glad the tubes are doing stern service. Good aren't they?

Peace

Bernd:16:

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Originally Posted by Feanor

You know that there are certain equipment snobs who will never admit that a lower cost solution will approach -- or maybe exceed -- a high-cost solution. Don't bother them with facts, their minds are made up.
:sleep:

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My dear friend Feanor,

I hope this wasn't a cheap shot directed at me. I am far from an equipment snob. I am all for it to spent less for better performance. Just haven't come across to many units that fit that.
Hope you are well.

Peace

Bernd:16:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bernd

My dear friend Feanor,

I hope this wasn't a cheap shot directed at me. I am far from an equipment snob. I am all for it to spent less for better performance. Just haven't come across to many units that fit that.
Hope you are well.

Peace

Bernd:16:

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You know how it is Bernd. Those that cant hear the difference, will point a finger and call you a snob. Its normal! And once they hear a system that blows their mind, they are too stuck in their routine bashing of quality equipment that they cant admit that they are wrong.

-Flo