Mac Laptop & Sound Cards

Let me add an additional consideration. I have four Macs, with this 1.67 GHz PowerPC G4 with only 1 GB of memory being the most current. A friend uses a HT with two 750 GB drives, one as backup and uses MS music player software to get a AES/EBU into his dac. Can I use a Mac instead of this PC stuff? Could I store the music on the external hard-drives and control with my Mac? Would it not be the case that Apple Lossless would be the equal of AIFF he uses?

Yep -

All those are, are external drives. If you are using a tower, I strongly recommend you add a PCI SATA card, especially if you are going with that kind of storage. Simply much faster and more robust then Firewire or USB.

Good question about the AES/EBU output - I personally haven't come across that. I am sure it is doable using an add in card from Lynx, Apogee or the like. Remember that Mac is the computer of choice in recording studios...

Apple Lossless is equivalent to AIFF and WAV just more compact. Also - and this comes in handy - Apple Lossless does a much better job handling metadata (additional kinds of information about each song) then either WAV or AIFF

The key thing I try and get across to people is the overall superiority of iTunes. It provides an integrated approach to all the functions you need for computer based music - ripping, metadata, list management, archiving in a world class package. There are some very good apps for PCs but they are not integrated and the support is nowhere near at the same level - how can freeware be... It's great if you are very savvy and like to fiddle but if you want to just play music this is much more straightforward.

you don't need a pc, mac's have a much better operating system. with 4 macs, you can do a lot of cool stuff for a distributed whole house music system. you can share your itunes from 1 central mac, you can have each mac in a different room playing different itunes selections, you can use airport express devices wired or wireless to help in distributing the music, you can hook up an external dac between you mac or the airport express for better quality sound, and on and on. this is what i'm using for all my rooms except for my dedicated audio room. someday, i might put an itunes feed into it.

Ckorody and Rbstehno, I would be using the Mac as a controller with all the storage in the HT box with a AES/EBU lead going to the dac. It is John Tucker of Exemplar, a close friend, who has this running. My question really is whether it is easier and better with a Mac. I don't really want itunes running everywhere. When I am not listening to music, I like silence. But I suspect that using a music server as the source of my digital would great outperform my use of cd transports. At least that is what John says he has achieved.

What's an HT box?