The best of the DACs

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.

Check out the Totaldac D1. Not cheap but so far nothing has beat it (from what I have read). Check out the mini review on 6 moons. I have no doubt it would sound way, way better than your Ayre (assuming you have a great computer audio set-up including cabling). You can also run it straight into your amps for even more pure sound.

Edorr -- quite the opposite, don't think we disagree at all. (Well,not to nit pick, but bits very much are bits -- that's the fundamental nature of digital bits -- but how you move them about, clock them, address jitter, etc very much matters when you try to convert all those tens of thousands of digital snapshots per second describing music back into actual music. Timing counts a lot.). My intended point is that, in a CDP, the tech, the wiring, the clocking -- all the traffic cop functions on this bit stream -- are fixed under the hood. In a computer setup, in contrast, you're in control of how this gets done. You can run synchronous or asynchronous. You can add a separate reclocker in the chain. You can run USB, optical, throw in a converter, or do all manner of other connections. You can run digital room correction suites in the digital domain before even offloading to the DAC. This is a fantastic amount of freedom and flexibility. Of course, this is also the freedom to do vastly more harm than good -- but I don't profess to tell folks what to do with it. That's a way bigger can of worms than I'm prepared to tackle. Put differently, these days a computer can be made to sound at least as good as a CDP. It can be done, full stop. Execution, agreed, counts for everything -- but "how" and "whether it's worth the effort" are further than I intended and/or an individual call.

Bettering a CD transport is easy. Just make the right choices.

Try bettering vinyl:

(http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=95464#msg960567)

Steve N.
Empirical Audio