Why are there so many Mac users?

Jax2 I understand your response and and nothing to say to your experiences. I refer to statistical issues and not personal ones. I have a wintel gaming system that I have never seen hang or fail in anyway what so ever! I make no claims on wintel systems do to this. I have seen MACs crash and I have seen PC's crash. From a software stability standpoint I have to give the edge to MAC as they are far fewer players in that market and MAC has much better control of content. MS has lots of control but no where near the same. If you want a mess put a noob on a linux system and wait for the next kernel update or something. Personally I've spent lots of time on macs and can give some good examples of colossally stupid things like the lack of functioning dynamic memory allocation on OS9. OSX is a huge improvement. As for credible sources several companies have published their findings and there are regular IT reviews among that crowd. I dont count most of the stuff on the web in this case. THe last data I saw from one of the largest support groups in the world showed that there was not much between the units (hardware wise)
the reason you dont get virus is that there are few that can hit it. wait a while the number is increasing really fast. Ignoring the user feel (that is preference IMO) the big difference is that MAC has much better control of the system than MS. If MAC wants to get MS big they will need to give up control and then they will hit the same issues.

personally I have used every mac since the apple II, every windows since 3.1, and about every unix flavor and a dozen Linux distros and personally I've seen failures in all of them. My first virus was on a mac oddly enough. I am not insulting MAC Jax2, merely pointing out that the world is not full of exploding windows boxes and that the consumer needs to figure out for themselves what they like. PC's are tools, nothing more.

PAT 70 I think that in this usage the MAC would likely be a the best solution for you. While drivers can easily be an issue with new equipment in this case there are lots of examples of MAC's being used in this field and you will not need to invent anything. You are correct about the smaller software case but the mac build should work fine for you including ripping. I would suggest checking the PC audio forum and seeing if you can get a "recipe" from someone. Personally I just got a mini for my father in law (intuitive and small form factor) and the mini version with the big HDD caught my eye for this application. This with iTunes and a good dac should be sweet.

Can mac be used to download and playback 24/96 and 24/192 files via external DAC? Where can I learn more to setup a mac based server playbacl system?

Have you noticed that Windows keeps trying and trying to be a MAC?

Paulsax - I went thru all DOS and Windows version in last 25 years nad now have Mac Mini for about a year. Oh my God - what a difference. The problem is not only that Windows is clumsy and unstable but that Microsoft doesn't fix their own mistakes - they just publish bugs on their website but nothing is done. Windows XP cannot, for instance, make backup to CD but it can backup to floppy (bug published on their website). It wasn't fixed from beginning of Win XP and most likely still isn't. I had to unistall Norton from my work computer because was hanging up fighting with Windows for resources.

You say that Windows 7 is way better - I heard this after every Windows release. I suspect that they don't even want to fix bugs in order to sell next version.

New 64 bit Snow Leopard takes 100MB less of a disk space while Windows takes more - it makes you think.

If you really have to use Windows with constant hang-ups and cryptic error messages better be very familiar with software and computers. If you're new to computers - forget it and get MAC.