Will computer to DAC replace transports and cdp's?

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.

Matrix, all good points.

My player is also a top end DVD, DVDa multi-channel player used as part of a combined 2 channel and HT system. Muse Thalia. I need it for this use and the computer based system wont help in these areas. I dont want to buy a DAC but may be forced.

Bill

I have thought the same about Ipod but it will not have quality sound files in the first place like the lossless systems of the other types, I think it is primarily compressed files like mp3 or something... from what I understand the only way is to have a big Gig hard drive or memory card type setup and transfer CD completly un-altered, an Apple type computer is suppose to be excellent, but Ipod itself is not near the quality of CD from my understanding.