Will computer to DAC replace transports and cdp's?

Kublakhan: In regards to your plan to layout your storage as a 2 disk stripe, I wouldn't recommend it. Striped disks offer no data protection with the benefit being increased I/O. I doubt if the disk I/O requirements for audio would push the limits of even a regular PC hard drive sending a single stream. If one of those disks goes out on you, you lose all of the data, the same as if you only had one disk. Look at mirroring the drives, which will give you exactly half the usable storage as the total of both. The other option is a RAID 5 device, which requires a minimum of 3 or 4 drives. A safe estimate of usable storage would be all the disks added up, minus one. RAID 5 will give you very good I/O especially disk read performance. Both of these solutions will protect you against any single disk going bad. More importantly you can rest easier at night knowing something catastophic would have to happen for you to lose all of the songs on your drives. I don'd deal with the MS Windows world too much, so I'm not sure if XP or something like that can create these type of virtual devices for you without having to buy additional software or not, but the same would apply to your striped volume ( disk ).
Personally, I'm in the process of upgrading my wireless network to support Apple's Airport express. I borrowed a buddy's for a few weeks and really liked the results and the lack of wires. I'm convinced wireless is the future for home networking, audio is good to go right now, video will be down the road as the wireless speeds and technologies continue to improve.

Someday I'm going to have to add pics of my PC based rig...

I'm in the Marco-camp, in the sense that I have a PC with a USB audio device (Waveterminal U24 also), which connects to a dCS Purcell, dCS Delius, then onto the preamp. My PC is a little (mebbe 2"H x 8"W x 12"D) serener fanless PC. Its got a NEC spinpoint drive, which make it one of the quietest PCs I have ever heard (really, "not heard"... its dead quiet). The spinpoint drive isn't huge--80GB--so the serener is connected to my home ethernet and accesses a Buffalo terastation stored in a closet. The Terastation is 4 x 250 GB drives, configured as RAID 5, so its pretty safe. If I blow up two drives at once, guess I'm reripping everything, but that prospect seems pretty minimal.

I do all my ripping using EAC in secure mode, which seems to be the best option for getting bit-perfect copies. I use a little script called iTunesEncode to interface between EAC and iTunes--EAC rips the wav file, gets tag information from CDDB, and passes it all off to iTunes to have the file converted into Apple Lossless (ALAC), with tags. I do have to add album art separately. I will typically then switch the iTunes library and convert the ALAC files to 128kbps AAC files for iPod use--means they are stored in a completely different subdirectory.

For controlling playback, I use a 10" viewsonic airpanel, a wireless touchscreen that has one trick only--it acts as a remote desktop under the PC RDP protocol. So, I can sit on the couch with the 10" touchscreen, see the iTunes interface, and select songs that are then pulled off the terastation by the PC and sent to the stereo.

The little serener is also sufficient horsepower to run slimserver, which is sort of integrated with iTunes. Slimserver is the "always on" side of the squeezebox system. I've got a bunch of Squeezebox 3s in other parts of the house that interact with the slimserver to deliver audio, from the common library to other stereos.

The SB3s are hooked up to systems that really aren't all that high-end, so I can't really comment on the fidelity of those. But, my serener->waveterminal u24->main rig sounds as good to my ear as my DV50S playing the same CD run through the same upsampling/DAC system.

My only complaints are that, with 1600 CDs, over 15,000 songs (stored both in ALAC and AAC) and 400 GB of tunes, iTunes runs a little slow. iTunes is also *not* my favorite user interface--I know Apple is supposed to do good UIs, but this isn't one of the better ones. No provision for looking at album art when you scroll through your albums... No play queue you can just "add" too as you scroll through your music... Sure, you can fake some of this stuff, but... I really need a better UI.

Got a chuckle reading Edesilva's post.
IMO, if you need to do all 'a this jazz to simply play music, please beam me back to the 60's...

Matrix

To your comment:
"an Apple type computer is suppose to be excellent, but Ipod itself is not near the quality of CD from my understanding."

An iPod is just a very small hard drive installed in a very small case with some software to navigate to the songs you want. It's entirely up to the user whether the music on the iPod is stored in a format that is identical to the original CD or compressed.

The limitation of the iPod as a source is that it's designed primarily for convenience and portability, meaning there is no digital output and the number of uncompressed songs you can store is limited by the available capacity of 1 inch hard drives.

If you go to a slightly larger device size, to something like an Archos Jukebox, you get a 2.5 inch hard drive with theoretically higher capacity and USB connection.

As with all other things audio you just pick your system based on format, form factor, price, quality and convenience, there's no right or wrong choice.

Bravo Edesilva -- great post. Tons of info in there.