Will computer to DAC replace transports and cdp's?

Great thread! I am very close to going down this road. One FM question. I understand you can feed FM off your computer just like CD's. Seems there are FM streams which can be used. Is the sound quality as good as everything I am reading about here (CD) ? I think this could replace my FM tuner. I would assume the sound has a dead quiet background and no reception issues. Can someone tell me if these "FM" computer streams are free? Uncompressed? Choice of Jazz, Classical etc??

Great stuff and most exciting to me.

Thanks,

Bill

One other question. Can't we send our current high end players with great DAC's in for moding by the builders? They can simply install a S/PDIF input. Now I can use my player as the DAC for a computer based front end or use the transport in my player when playing CD's, DVD's , SACD's and DVDa's. I can do it all! I would think this is a pretty simple mod for our players?

One thing I forgot to add to my above post is that all my tunes were ripped in Apple Lossless format.

There is no fan noise on my Apple Laptop -- I have the unit on a stand that keeps one end propped up and it is virtually silent.

FM Radio: Many radio stations offer a webcast of their boradcasts and the sound quality is good. Not all stations do this though. That said, I subscribe to Live365 which is an internet radio clearing house that has thousands of stations of both FM and CD quality, commercial free, in every genre imaginable. I spend almost as much time listening to this as I do my CD collection on hardrive. It is not that expensive given what you gain access too.

I have heard that it is easy to add a digital input on some CD players and extremely difficult with others.

There are other people who participate on this site who are far more qualified than I to answer the questions about why the hard-drive transport can sound as good as a dedicated CD transport. In fact, they have done so on other threads on this very same topic at this site.

Grannyring, sure I have seen wadia with input cards, and Quad Audio type CD players able to play the disk and have an external music source flow thru right to the internal dac, they even come with several digital inputs I think too.. This is good because you can have a good transport right there, as well as all your high quality cables are shared to feed the analog audio signal to your system after conversion...This eliminates having to have several cables too. So yes even the super hi-end pieces can be modified to be not completly obsolete. But I just choose to for now use a good DAC cause it will never go out of style and is a safer investment and will always just be a good decoder box basically for whatever Redbook source can be thrown at it, and just Run any type Transport I want vs. expensive CDP,Plus Dac's in general now have extra input so I can leave a transport and when the Audio MEdia systems settle down, can hook anything else simaltaneous to the same dac and not lose out on anything.. But I will never invest in a a very expensive straight CD player again, cause yeah unless they all start offering or can even fit the extra components in it for external devices to share the dac its a risk, and will start loosing value more and more.

Given the above, it would be great to have an ipod with a digital output for a DAC.