Yea, computer as source can sound great. But they're not entirely plug and play, because they're just not designed that way. Operating systems are designed -- gasp -- to make computers work as computers and do all those things a computer might do. So, just having an OS running on a given machine is going to task the machine with doing orders of magnitude more stuff than is strictly required to read media off of a disk and send a digital bit stream to a DAC. And physically, they are of course designed with different goals than the bare minimum, as 99.99% of the consuming public is not interested in a single-purpose computer. This shouldn't be a mystery to anyone.
That said, there is of course much that can be done to unclutter and streamline any given computer set-up, and I have seen many guides as to how to achieve this. Of course, some are more aggressive than others. Personally, I'm not interested in running a stripped down and castrated OS, as I do in fact find it quite useful to use the computer for other stuff. (A bona fide HTPC, streams music, movies, Netflix, youtube, the works). I want that, and am not willing to give it up. Yet when I play music, I turn all of the extra whistles and bells off, run through a program that provides "hog" mode (which basically shuts all other OS functions out of the loop and monopolizes the necessity bits and pieces), and there you go.
So, all of the tools are readily available to accomplish the task at hand. But you definitely have to tweak things a bit. Personally, I'm not in the least bit interested in spending anything more for an expensive, low-production-run, bespoke, music-only computer transport. Just no interest. Do I think there might be a market for such a thing? Sure, there obviously is. And unless you're willing to invest a little "sweat equity" figuring out how to optimize an off-the-shelf machine, perhaps that's the way to go. But for me, and I understand for many, and old-school Mac Mini (before they stupifyingly removed the optical drive), running a pre-Lion OS, which is just a little overly-busy (Snow Leopard, for me), does the trick with aces.
Thus, I guess, my answer is yes: sound quality of computer audio can and should be improved. But it is entirely within your (and each of our) power to do just that. And if you'd rather pay someone else to do it for you, you can of course do that, too. But if the argument is that there is some form of inexcusable, systemic failure in the market for failing to have created and offered just the purpose-built machine any given one of us might idiosyncratically feel suits our needs -- then, well, if there really were such a market worth exploiting, I'm sure it would get done. And, to the extent it hasn't, there you go. No?
