The computer is the way to go if you want to get the best fidelity with a hard drive based transport. I rip my CD's to my hard drive and ipod uncompressed using AIFF. With hard drives getting larger and cheaper, I don't see any reason to use compression. I set up a system with a G4 Power book outputting via USB connection to an Apogee Mini-Dac and it sounds really, really good. On the other hand, I connect my ipod to my car stereo using the headphone out and it sounds good, too. Not as good as the computer through the Apogee, but good enough for the car, far better than a 6 CD changer.