Hi Dave,
From my experience, I think you do have to go through "this much trouble" to get good quality out of a computer. I don't think it was too much trouble though. I've found that in my experience, seperating the power from the computer is a major difference in sound quality, as well as bypassing the Kmixer in windows. The best sound card in the world is going to sound bad if the data fed to it is distorted from the kmixer (and I imagine the dirty power from the computer doesn't help the situation). I am very happy with the quality I am now getting from the computer. I didn't think it would be possible, but USB with it's own power source is the way to go. I'm using Vista now, which doesn't have the kmixer anymore and it sounds MUCH better than XP did... I mean night and day difference here. I am not sure if it's better than ASIO in XP, since I can't easily A/B them. You may want to try ASIO on your system and see what you think if you haven't already. I think a PC can surpass any transport if it's set up right. The technology to pull data off a hard drive is far surperior to optical CD technology, as long as you get bit perfect transfers to the drive in the first place. Maybe certain transports color the sound in a pleasing way that the PC won't do, but that's what my DAC and tube system are for.
Ben
From my experience, I think you do have to go through "this much trouble" to get good quality out of a computer. I don't think it was too much trouble though. I've found that in my experience, seperating the power from the computer is a major difference in sound quality, as well as bypassing the Kmixer in windows. The best sound card in the world is going to sound bad if the data fed to it is distorted from the kmixer (and I imagine the dirty power from the computer doesn't help the situation). I am very happy with the quality I am now getting from the computer. I didn't think it would be possible, but USB with it's own power source is the way to go. I'm using Vista now, which doesn't have the kmixer anymore and it sounds MUCH better than XP did... I mean night and day difference here. I am not sure if it's better than ASIO in XP, since I can't easily A/B them. You may want to try ASIO on your system and see what you think if you haven't already. I think a PC can surpass any transport if it's set up right. The technology to pull data off a hard drive is far surperior to optical CD technology, as long as you get bit perfect transfers to the drive in the first place. Maybe certain transports color the sound in a pleasing way that the PC won't do, but that's what my DAC and tube system are for.
Ben