PC as a transport vs Regular transport or player

I tried it. Most USB to DAC's can't touch the quality of even a mid line cd player. I couldn't find an external computer USB that even came close in quality to my pioneer dvd player's sound.
The only other option is USB to something like the Live24 external DAC and use the toslink out on the DAC to a quality D/A-that's 1 usb cable, then 1 toslink cable, then a pair of coax cables. What a mess.

It is important to distinguish something here. Using a laptop as an interface and the hard-drive as the transport is different than putting a disc into the computer and listening to the computer playing the disc.

I agree that the computer playing the disc is not worthwhile at all. But the music file being played via hard-drive through a quality DAC, sounds as good, if not better, to me, than some pretty nice transports/CD Players. I have commented on this before and there are other threads on this here at Audiogon.

My hard-dive base system played only through a U24 Waveterminal (as the D/A) sounded as good on rebook as my McIntosh 205 changer and a Sony XA777ES.

Virtually every recording made in the past 3 years was at some point recorded/processed/mixed or mastered on a hard drive type audio system. That covers the horrid sounding pop/rock releases as well as audiophile favs. Properly setup they are the equal of high quality dedicated CD transports.