The best of the DACs

Good points Mezmo......I guess it may be too much for me to learn the whole computer thing. I suspect that someday, all of that will be more consumer friendly, but as of now....I get great sound from my CD player and turntable to invest my time and money into computer playback...just too much for not a great deal of reward for me.

Sounds to me like you've got it all dialed in just right. Nothing left but to kick
back and enjoy. Cheers.

When it comes to audio.....I don't let DACs, transports or computers enter my listening room.
I am a strictly analogue (vinyl) buffoon.
But I just need to say that Mezmo's post is one of the most erudite, educated and convincing statement.....it has been my pleasure to read.

Memo, your post could be construed as a "bits are bits", source makes no difference. This is absolutely not the case. A cd player based system is usually synchronous, while pretty much all USB dacs are asynchronous. In practice, sometime fairly dramatic differences in sound quality are possible between the two, mainly because of differences between jitter levels of whatever device provides the master clock (which may be the cd player, a usb converter or the dac) in the architecture.

The other thing about CD players is you can get "bargins" on high end cd players, at least on the used market. So many people are moving to computer audio that it has becomes somewhat of a buyers market. So your dollar for performance may go a bit further with CD players over computer audio. Even so, I will never go back to cd players. I love the convenience of being able to choose whatever track I want from any album at anytime. Just use my ipad or iphone to select. No mess with disk, don't have to get up or anything.