Music from hard drive better than CD?

That's the beauty of a hard drive based system. Vastly greater convenience with ready access to your entire music collection without any penalty in sound quality. It worthwhile to take the time to use the rating, comment, composer and grouping fields to organize your music into playlist.

Let me preface this with just how ignorant I am with regard to most of this technoogy. I am challanged by the idea that a highly frictionaly induced, magnetic, vulnerable, hard drive system can be superior to a minimally frictionaly induced, optical, secure CD system. Re: Mac vs. Windows, for better or worse (and I think potentionaly better) convergence of audio and video is comming. In this regard I think Apple has way to go before they catch up with Windows XP Media Center 2005.

My computer using aes/ebu playing .wav files on winamp sounds as good or better than my Modwright Sony 999es using spdif or even RCA on bypass.

Exact Audio Copy is very good. So is Foobar.

I use the CDP to preview CD's or to play when I don't feel like letting the computer take time "booting up". I noticed that I do not need warm up time like I do with the Sony using RCA on bypass.

Not sure how to explain it but my new computer set-up does sound qualitatively better than my McIntosh MCD 205 changer (which IS saying something). I'm sure many dedicated cdp's would sound better.