Will computer to DAC replace transports and cdp's?

Hi All,
I agree that eventually this will be the way to go. There is a VERY exoensive DVD system called Kaleidascape (sp?) that does this for movies. It will also hold HD material. AS you can imagine, it takes very large drives to hold that much material. It also retails for $30,000, at least. I can foresee the not very far future when all the dat will be sent to a high qulity set of DACs, say a Theta Casablnca with room correction. But it will take sveral years to make it availabl and affordable. Also, the storage softaware and algorithms have to be standardized. Meanwhile, I am REALLY enjoying my Esoteric X01 and my Meitner gear (one of which will eventually get sold).

David Shapiro

Edesilva:
Don't get me wrong, I'm not dissin' you or your masterful grasp of the technology involved.

However, your post reminds me of a tech company I worked for. This company used PCs instead of mainframes (my thing). To obtain test data, I had to perform a 35 step procedure to get data from one environment to another (so I could use it). I didn't stay there long.

As for the short-term memory thing -You're absolutely right! The upside is I've had 35 years of practice coping with (artificially induced) senility!
Old age? Bring it ON baby!

I'm somewhat surprised that nobody has really mentioned the issue of jitter. Reading the data without errors is not the problem (in a PC), but the data stream going out is still controlled by the internal clock (on the sound card), which the clock in the DAC syncs up with. Here's an excerpt from a review of the Lynx 2 audio card:

"Some time ago it was assumed that high-quality sound could not be obtained at all on a computer system because of magnetic pickups from a video card and a processor into the sound card's circuit of the printed-circuit board, terrible power supply from a pulse power supply unit, jitter in converters, inadmissible usage of transfer electrolytic capacitors, low-quality connectors, cheap components of the analog section. " [http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/lynxtwo/index.html]

The best approach seems to be to have the master clock in the DAC circuitry and have it control the transport's sending clock, or have them be one and the same. The latter may be done in integrated CDPs, the former can be found in products from Wadia and dCS as well as high-end audio cards (Lynx L22, LynxTWO, Emu1280M).

Like many of you I'm in the process of capturing all my CDs (to ALAC - Apple lossless), but I'm not sure a $100 or even $200 sound card will do high quality headphones or speakers justice.

BTW, some of you were looking at controlling the music remotely, and the touchpad option is certainly a good one. Something else to consider (especially if you aren't overly concerned with jitter coming off a hard drive based source) is the Sonos music system. I own several of their zone players and controllers, and it's great for listening over my built-in speakers. It's biggest plus is ease of use (very reliable, intuitive, and a killer interface especially with the little wireless remote). The built-in DAC is ok but not the greatest, but they are coming out with a zone player with digital out, which would let you use an external DAC and amp (not sure about jitter though). Highly recommended!

Frank

Frank, a lot of us swear by USB audio devices instead of sound cards. I don't have experience with a lot of the "pro" soundcards from the likes of RME and such, but you can minimize some of the jitter effects from reclocking inside a noisy computer by taking the audio out of the USB port and going directly into a DAC with a USB input or to a device like the M-Audio Transit, Waveterminal U24, or Empirical Audio Off Ramp. The reclocking is done in the external device. It may not be immune to reclocking jitter, but a lot of people's experience suggests USB devices are a better solution...

Having dCS gear, I am interested by the concept of a card with a word clock that can be sync'd with my upsampler/DAC, but haven't gone that route yet. Wish there was a USB device that did that...

I've been in the computer industry forever and yes raids do fail but typically it's becuase of bad batches of drives or heat problems. The raid controller and driver support are critical plus the alerting system of a drive failure is even more important and the most neglected item. Make sure to setup your email alert and test that the alert actually works. The MWARE controllers are the only ones for PC's that are even close to a good HP/COMPAQ raid controller, plus they have the ability to expand the array. If you are really concerned get the WD drives designed for Raid (Serial ATA) or Seagate (quieter). I was suprised in my home case with 4 drives and huge 120mm fans that while defragging the HD the drive temp soared to 60 C (upper limit of too hot) and I've had to crank up the fans to max to keep the drive at the 50-55 degrees... The Maxtor drives in my 2 systems run about 7-9 degrees hotter than the Seagates. HEAT KILLS.

I'm waiting for 500gig serial ata drives to drop in price so that I can do a 4-5 drive raid 5 with the Mware controller.

but I condered just using the two 400gig drives along with a cheap and portable backup solution.. periodically backup my local drives to an inexpensive external (under $700 for 1 Gig) using SynToy (free and awesome!) from Microsoft to do the backup duties fast. (only send what's changed over. Plus I would get a firewire 800 interface as even USB2.0 is slow if you need to defrag.

I am going to be doing a mod'd Squeezebox from Boulder Cables and upgraded powersupply and feed my Theta GenVIII DAC and compare as ease of access to my 800 cd's via my Table PC controling Slimserver via a web browser. Plus picking albums by album art ROCKS!! not to mention just sitting back and surfing while listening to great music.

I keep my server in another room so I don't have to deal with noise and use my wireless network to the music to my system.

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