Music from hard drive better than CD?

>>it is absolutely no surprise the today's PC hard drive configs don't compete
with EMM Labs gear.<<

Surprise? Who said this was a surprise?

>>good transports or bad, you can be pretty sure that your DAC is getting a
bit-perfect feed.<<

Okay.

>>jitter...replacing a transport with a hard drive will not remove this
problem.<<

You're not just replacing the transport with a hard drive; If you use
something like the Apogee Mini-Dac, you're also introducing a high quality
clock and DAC.

>>something other than jitter--at least as he was measuing it--was causing
an effect on his "perfect sound forever."<<

There are many things that go into making a great sounding DAC.

>>But for *really* good reproduction, it'll be years before anything beats a
CDP or TT.<<

That's vague. Depends on what you call a *really* good CDP. It has already
been established that a computer plus $1,000 DAC will not compete with
$10,000 Emm Labs gear, but neither will any other digital gear.

A computer plus $1,000 DAC absolutely sounds better to my ears than many
CD players.

For those who can build their own, here are some great links:

1. At the botom of this page you will find nice Multimedia cases: http://www.xoxide.com/silverstone1.html

2. Then you can install a quiet/fanless power supply from here: http://www.xoxide.com/fanlesspsu.html

There is a nice doc by Jon Risch at : http://www.geocities.com/jonrisch/jitter.htm.

I think one can partition what I shall call 'convenience' and 'sound reproduction' roughly to the transport (or source medium) and DAC respectively. Here's what I mean: I really liked Onhwy61's post where he was able to move from song to song, quickly and easily. For me, that would be a wonderful part of at least some of my listening experiences. There is an analogy to DVDs here: in terms of sales, the DVD has been the greatest home electronic success in history. And it is no wonder--DVDs offer a clear value proposition over VHS that virtually any video consumer can appreciate. Similarly, computer-based home entertainment systems (and variants thereof) offer great promise, to the degree that they offer not just more "convenience," but that this can operationally change the way we listen to music.

DACs with on-board clocks can re-clock the data stream, making them virtually immune to the transport, be it CD, hard drive, RAM, whatever. So there is no reason why convenience needs to be at the expense of high quality sound reproduction. But DACs are still not completely immune, as Jon hints towards in this article above. Cable reflections, ground bounce, chip load, etc. these will affect DACs even with on-board clocks, and highly resolving systems will invariably uncover a source medium dependency. Source mediums specifically made to minimize jitter, such as high-end transports, will make it easier on the DAC. There is nothing that I know of in the computer industry that gives computer-based storage systems any translational benefit over to *DAC technology* that the traditional digital audio community is not already aware. So when it comes to sound reproduction, the traditional digital audio community is likely to still command the lead. If this is achieved reasonably inexpensively via pro-audio, or esoterically in boutique audio, is really an issue that is applicable re one's own system, resources, and goals.

One thing missing from all above posts thus far is a discussion on error free music free rippig. Not every CD-ROM or DVD-ROM is created equal. It's not as simple as which format to choose but which ripping SW/CD-ROM.

One of the better SW is EAC (Exact Audio Copy). It's capable of creating an exact copy of you CD. Bit for bit. It does this by slow down the drive and read it at least twice. (with the correct configuration of course).

I ripped my library of 400+ CDs using Windows Media Player 9 and came to discover some of them contain excessive errors. (sound skiping and etc) I am in the progress of redoing all of them. Very painful.

Eric

I have been using the combination of iTunes/AirportExp/benchmark DAC1 as the front-end.

Can Foobar be taught to stream audio into the AirportExpress as the iTunes does.