Is computer audio a bust?

I see many posts as to the ease of using computer audio. But nothing about how long it took to set up your music library and the cost and time involved. Anybody? Were you able to get that great sound you have right out of the gate, or did you have to keep changing things as the technology improved? Just curious...Cost of music ripped, time involved ripping, cost of the entire computer audio section?

If one has a CD player and is satisfied listening to whole CDs, then probably no reason to change.

Computer audio opens up entirely new listening scenarios though beyond listening to one CD at a time. I can queue music in my library up in any order I want and let it play on. OR I can quickly search and find what I want to hear without interruption. I find I have discovered a ton of new music I was not familiar with but learned to like this way compared to the old way of picking one CD or recording to listen to at a time. Very liberating and very conducive for exploring new music. Plus the album, track artist and related info is at your fingertips to explore further if desired.

Then there is the variety of music available via internet radio and music streaming services, many with very good sound quality these days as well.

These are features that add utility to the music listening experience for most. No need to change really unless one is interested in exploring the new possibilities with computer audio. Sound quality can be top notch either way with just a little care and attention.

"I see many posts as to the ease of using computer audio. But nothing about how long it took to set up your music library and the cost and time involved. Anybody? Were you able to get that great sound you have right out of the gate, or did you have to keep changing things as the technology improved? Just curious."

YEs, I got great sound right out of the gate several years ago using a Roku Squeezebox and DAC of choice. That continued as I moved to Squeezebox feeding same DAC and system, and now as well as I start to implement PLEX as an eventual Squeezebox replacement.

Cost is minimal compared to a lot of "high end" audio, especially if you already have a computer.
Creating and maintaining a library does involve some work to get tagging correct, but mostly for classical music. Setting up backups with software is not hard or costly. Seagate drives work great and come with backup software already installed for example.

Data volumes for lossless music libraries can get large. My .wav library of about 2000 CDs comes in at just under 1Tb and the converted FLAC version about half that.

As Mapman says, internet radio has very good sound quality, and I do listen to that on occasion. That's easy for me. I even pay a small monthly charge for better quality streaming. It also is a way to explore artists unknown.
But as far as me getting into the full computer audio realm, I don't see that happening. I had a heck of a time just moving from Windows XP to this Windows 8.1, which I hate, btw. Creating a new library? I'm too old and really not that interested. Just getting lazy, I guess. Old fart...

The original question was one of sound quality using a computer as a source vs a high-quality CD transport. I believe the answer to that question is "Yes, if the components are properly selected and configured, the computer source can sound as good as a CD transport".

A lot of discussion has gone both ways in terms of computer audio being a "bust" vs the future. I think that this question is more easily answered. After all, the convenience of computer audio and its ability to expose you to music that is either not music you're familiar with (from streaming audio sources like Pandora) or music from your own collection that you haven't thought to play on a CD for a long time, is a major plus.

But beyond that, where do we think that the true growth market in new music is going to be? If you're a young music group looking to get your work out there, the most cost-effective way of doing this is to have your work published electronically. It's going to be significantly more difficult to get with a record label that will stamp commercial discs. In addition, this allows them to also exceed the parameters of a redbook CD, and potentially get better audio quality.

So from a practical perspective, if we limit ourselves to physical discs (either vinyl or CD's), then we're sharply restricting our access to music to play in the future.

When seen from the perspective of computer audio being a large growth industry, then it will be almost certain that products will continue to evolve to support the quality demands of that small fraction of us called audiophiles that want good quality sound from computer audio. After all, we're the ones that divorced the transport and the DAC and frequently put them in two separate boxes, and we've been doing that for well over 2 decades (which is the majority of the duration that CD's have even been around). So it shouldn't take much to get a computer transport to be at least as good as a physical CD transport; indeed, I would argue that we are already there with many of our setups.

Yes, accurate and consistent tags in computer sound files is important. But we're seeing more and more automated tagging systems that can take care of this. And we're seeing more ripping software comparing the results of each track rip with other people who have ripped those same CD's to assess for the probability of having achieved 100% accuracy in the rip. So I don't think that either of these two arguments as reasons why someone should shy away from computer audio to be valid now.

Keep in mind that only in the past decade or so has storage space sufficient for an entire audio library in lossless formats been affordable. I remember when I was working as a software engineer that my company purchased a 64GB RAID array in 1997 for $20,000. It had over a dozen drives in it, and could hold maybe the equivalent of 200 or so CD's in FLAC format. Less than 20 years later a 2TB drive with 30+ times the storage space is available for under $100. The point here is that computer audio is still in its early years, and will continue to improve as time goes on.

This is the future, and the industry will be putting its R&D money here rather than towards further enhancing redbook CD transports. Consequently, we will continue to see better and better performance as the industry matures.

Just my 2 cents.

Michael