new updates in transports or are they obsolete ?

Audioengr,

Can you suggest some hardwares & softwares to setup a computer base audio system?

Do I need USB2 or will USB1 be sufficient? Will the USB input DAC available today my best bet or should I use conventional DAC and add the interface hardware to convert USB to coax? Given that it's pure digital and audio freq is not very high, I assume adding a USB-coax converter like Waveterminal will not introduce errors.

Also, do I need to disable my sound card to direct audio bit stream to USB?

Thanks in advance.

RCprince - I dont think it was me that said anything about "delicate" anything. The CDROM or DVDROM drive reads the data into the computer to be stored on the Yamaha hard disk. That's all. You should not be trying to use your CD player to read data to the hard drive.

Semi wrote:
"Can you suggest some hardwares & softwares to setup a computer base audio system?"

You will need a laptop or a quiet tower with USB2.0, at least 2.0GHz Pentium. I would recommend the Off-Ramp Turbo USB to S/PDIF coax converter to a conventional DAC such as the excellent Benchmark DAC-1 (get a new one) or a modified Perpetual P-3A. The P-3A has the advantage of I2S input. I will be offering a USB to I2S converter at the new year. This is the native interface for the DAC chips, so it eliminates the S/PDIF interface, which is even better. If you want balanced outputs, the Benchmark is the best choice.

The sound card may compete with the USB interface, so you may need to defeat this. I talk about many of these things in my article on Computer Audio for positive-feedback.com. Look for this to be published soon.

Here is the article in Positive-feedback.com:
http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue22/nugent.htm

Audioengr, can you comment on the amount of hard drive storage space that is required per CD in lossless format? Thanks.