Quote Originally Posted by Hyfi
For those who can't hear the diference between MP3 and a regular CD, or don't care, go for it. I think anyone who spends $800 on a dac to play stripped down MP3s is wasting thier money. If your MP3s are sounding better than your CD player sounded then I would assume your player sucked or maybe another component in your playback system.

I am certainly not in the normal group when it comes to this issue, I use PCs as a productivity tool and not for my music. I didn't build a $10K music system to listen to crappy MP3s. I do have 100GB of MP3s that someone gave me but I rarely play any of it. I will agree that Internet Radio is cool for the veriety and diversity.
Quote Originally Posted by Jar
I would think one would be able to build a great sounding audio-only system for way less than a comprable sounding computer-based system.

If you have anything other than 6000 WAV files on your hard drive (I can't imagine that) then you're not listening to "cd quality"

-jar
Wow, I think you guys are missing Mike's point. Many people rip their CDs to the hard drive using either no compession or lossless compression like flac, not only for the convenience of having a great music jukebox literally at their fingertip, but also for better sound quality. Nothing to do with MP3. Each CD takes less than 500 MB with compression and hard drives art dirt cheap these days. Playing the files from hard drive and going USB or ethernet to a good quality DAC can result in better sound than a comparable system playing optical discs in real time, with the nagging problems of pit jitter that even the high end transports don't seem willing or able to solve, and little in the way of error recovery since the data can't be re-read. USB isn't a perfect bus to stream data across, but it's better than SPDIF by a long shot. And ethernet can be near perfect, and has the capability to connect all your audio systems throughout the house to one wireless server. I added a USB port to my DAC about a year or so ago and it's fun to sometimes use my laptop as a music server. I don't store much on my computer yet, but it does have a ton of potential.



NP: This monkey's gone to heaven ... Doolittle! What a great way to start a Saturday!