Is computer audio a bust?

Abuck,

In my case I had hundreds of CDs before going to digital music server.

A lot of those CDs stayed on the shelf and were seldom played in lieu of my more favorite ones. Exploring my CD music library extensively just did not happen nearly as much.

Now, as a result of listening to tracks from CDs on my server served up to me randomly by my digital player like a jukebox, rather than me having to seek out and play some track I am not really all that familiar with to start, I would say I get more than 1000% more enjoyment out of my existing music collection, without having to add a thing or listen to other sources. That all happens much more as well as my musical tastes become more diverse. And it all sounds as good as or better than ever as well.

All thanks to computer audio.

Now I spend my time finding really useful new things that I might try or do with different devices, software, features etc.

Much more productive than typical audiophile crap at this somewhat evolved point for me, like comparing sound with different fuses. I still do a lot of fine tuning of the gear I have, like moving speakers around and swapping into various rooms, to get the good sound results I always demand.

"An interesting thread. I didn't realize that there were a large number of people who had sampled C.A., found it wanting, and went back to CDPs. If one reads audiophile mags, particularly the British ones, you would never get that impression. "

I doubt there are a large # of people doing this frankly.

The title of this thread kind of skews the debate in that direction I think.

I suspect going around in general proposing that computer audio is a bust would be a losing proposition except with a) those already content with what they are doing so they have no need or 2) those who don't know what computer audio is and/or do not really care.

Well my rig is:

Esoteric UX-1
Yamamoto YDA-01
Leben CS-300 or
First Watt F5 clone
Zu Druid and Zu Method

Instead of the Esoteric I placed a MacBook Pro + external USB PSU + VLink USB SPDIF converter, using Audirvana and Fab Pro Eq, the conclusion was that my setup sounded better with the Esoteric in place.

End of the story: I quit Computer Audio.

Daniel

@ onhwy61, Hi, I am sorry for my outburst of loosing my patience, however, I believe cables are a important componet in every given system to the point, my cables are the most exspensive part of my system, I have NO regrets, their is no hyperboil with believing that a usb cable will NEVER have the profound sound of a world class balanced interconnect like the Tara Labs Zero Gold with HFX ground station, as a matter of fact, Tara had to down size the interconnect at the terminations to get the interconnect to work with balanced terminations, now, that said, how in the world would they EVER fit a usb termination on this interconnect?, The interconnect's girth is bigger than most speaker cables out there, LOL!

Fidelizer opened my eyes with respect to computer audio. JRiver alone didn't do a whole lot for me in terms of sound quality. Running fidelizer made all the difference in the world and encouraged me to go down the computer audio rabbit hole. Now I'm running Audirvana on a mac mini while my cd player is literally sitting by its lonesome in the spare bedroom. Audirvana will soon have it's own file management and will no longer be tethered to itunes. Can't wait.