Will computer to DAC replace transports and cdp's?

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.

Hi Jeremy,
Assuming we can burn the info off the cd in a bit perfect manner (many programs can),then what you have is two mediums with the same data. One is a 50 cent piece of plastic that is prone to scratches, in a poor clamped transport that looses data and corrects for it, with some vibration in the horizontal plane. The other is a bearing, platter and read mechanism that is built to strict tolerances, extracts data in a perfect manner, and does not scratch like plastic. They have a lot less vibration because the industry has spent billions in R & D.
We need look no further than phono cartriges. A better phono cartridge extracts the data from the same record better, the data (the record) is the same.
So in the playback of that data, the dac is presented with all the data, in a more perfect manner.
You are probably correct about hi rez as we know it (SACD & DVD_A) won't last . Computer audio has a lot less boundries. 24/96 and 24/192 is fine if you have the hard drive space. Has anyone heard Wilson Audio's master recordings at CES. They are breathtaking!!! Why can't we pay more and get what we really want?