Will computer to DAC replace transports and cdp's?

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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Hey guys,
I just bought an external hard drive to store all my music. When i drag my music onto it, now what? What can i erase on my itunes? How do i access the music on my hard drive to get to itunes?

>>>CAVEAT... After typing all this, I suddenly realized this assumes you have a PC, not a Mac. Similar principles should apply in the Mac environment, but this assumes a PC...

Let's see, you *copied* the songs from your main drive to the external drive, right? What format are they in?

Here's the general overview. iT has a library file that is basically an XML database that has info in it that has been read from the file tags (if available) and notes re: which playlist the song appears in, the playcount, etc. If you are OK with losing all that, you can just nuke the iT database file and then "add folders to library" specifying your external drive as the folder to add.

Here's why this might be a bad idea... You *will* lose all your playcounts and playlists. If you use a file format without tags--such as WAV--you will also lose all the album/artist/genre info, since that is *only* stored in the database for WAV files.

Here's another potential slip... iT has a feature called "keep my music organized" which will copy all the songs to where iT thinks they ought to be when you add them. So, even if you move them, if that flag is checked in iT, you will end up having all the files moved *back* to the iT default directory, which is probably *not* your external drive.

So what can you do? You can actually use the iT "keep organized" function to move the stuff for you. If you have copied the files, nuke 'em. Then reset the iTunes library to the external drive and check the "keep organized" button. That should result in all your files moving to the new external drive, organized into Artist/Album directories.

In the vein of potential slip ups... if you succeed in doing what you want, iT will have a new library where all the pointers are to a drive (specified by a letter). When your external drive is mounted, you need to make sure it appears as the same letter each time. Probably not that big a deal, but if you have a digital camera and turn that on before the external drive, you may find the digital camera memory as F: and the external drive as G:. If you turn them on in the reverse order, the external drive will be F: and teh camera G:. While you won't care, iT won't be able to find the files in one of those cases.