Music from hard drive better than CD?

It is also important to note that getting music from a cd onto a harddisk is non-trivial due to the vaguaries of the redbook format, so some quality will be dependent on the copy. There is more information about this at EAC (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) which seems to do the best job so far, and here's a good thread about both this and the squeezebox:

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?icomp&1082299211

Sorry, I just noticed that EAC has already been mentioned here.
I believe there are 2 main issues that effect the quality of audio from a hard drive, which are 1) creating an accurate copy of the source material onto the hard drive and 2) accurately transporting the data off of the hard disk to a DAC. I think that if these are optimized, it is possible to beat any cd transport.
I have been using a 4 meter run of coax SPIDF from a computer into a Meridian 518 with shorten and flac files created from EAC copies and sound quality is excellent, though I think the length of the cable is a drawback. A 1 meter AES/EBU from a Meridian transport is still better, but I think if all things were equal, the hard drive would win.

Jman66 - rip each track individually and play it back through foobar2000 or some other player without any pause between tracks. This is the normal way it is done in foobar. Foobar also allows you to crossfade the tracks if you so desire.

Jman66 - there are some computer music players that also treat "related" songs differently if tagged that way. For example, I believe I read that you can associate two songs with iTunes so that one will always follow the other and the normal gap that appears between songs will be skipped.

Nnyc - a four meter spdif coax run sounds loooong. Probably not as bad acoustically as the 30' toslink run I once had, however. That was what convinced me to go USB. I switched things up and ran a long USB run with repeaters and a short coax run and the world suddenly got vastly better...

>>Rsbeck: Do you run the Apogee mini Dac into a pre-amp or straing into a set of powered monitors?<<

I run it straight into powered monitors. There is no need for a pre-amp. This is one of the things I like about this set-up. The Apogee Mini-Dac has balanced outs and my powered monitors have balanced inputs. You go from computer to Dac to powered speakers -- very short path, lots of efficiencies, you eliminate the cables between amplifier and speakers, don't have to run the signal through a pre-amp, and it sounds great.

>>Can it be run into a preamp (like any DAC)? Thanks<<

It can be run into a pre-amp or you can go straight from the Apogee to your amplifier. The Apogee has a volume control and balanced outs.