Can best optical player rival best computer source

Anonymoustao, it is not easy to find the right Play Station 3 with the right software. Most PS3 owners are not very knowledgeable about their units and know nothing about sacds or what version of the software they have.

David12, I have yet to hear the Naim 555 but would be unwilling to pay anything like that price, especially as the Exemplar/Oppo has a much improved power supply and cost a fraction of the Naim's price. I really don't know anything to do but to try it versus my Empirical Audio server.

I am also about to experiment with putting my LPs onto my server using Pure Vinyl. This entails which devices I will use to digitize the analog feed. The benefit is, of course, to do the RIAA corrections in digital. I have many 45 rpm records of old jazz that are lovely but a pain.

Using a LINN Akurate with WAV and FLAC files (24/192) ripped from dbPoweramp, you will be very, very hard pressed to beat this sound from ANY cd player made. It would be in the 10's of thousands at least in order to even start to compare.

Just two months ago I would have said that computer based audio was a notch behind the better CD players. After adding a mac/Rega DAC to my system and hearing some other systems I've learned that the CDP is now a notch below. On average they are on par, but the server puts your entire music collection at your fingertips. It's a very seductive and I find I listen to more music now than ever before.

And that last item is the best reason why CDP's will slowly vanish. It's about the music first.

Cheers,

Rob

Yes, but the CD player cannot be a conventional design. It must essentially be a computer with CDROM disk that reads CD's at high-speed, converts them to .wav files and then spools the data out of RAM.

The design must obviously incorporate a low-jitter master clock and the implementation must be done by an expert.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Tbg I agree with you, I am not advocating buying any of the expensive players, I can't afford them either. The point was that the consensus I have picked up, is that discless digital is'nt yet up to competing with the very best disc players. It is progressing so fast, it may reach that level in the next few years