Is computer audio a bust?

"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.

ANyone who has an Amazon Fire TV device already, or thinking of getting one, I am getting very good results from that running Plex ($5 app for Fire TV) to stream same .FLAC files as my current Squeezebox system that I have run happily for several years now.

Amazon Fire TV ($99) is a fairly decent powered, Android computer specialized for streaming high res audio and video. It has toslink out that can run into most any DAC. PLEX connects to PLEX server you run on your computer file server.

An added benefit of PLEX is that you can access your media (video, photos, music) from anywhere with an internet connection. I use an Ipod with good quality earbuds at the local pool for example and sound quality is top notch.

Its all very good stuff. Not a bust by any stretch.