Used Rega Planet or Apollo vs. affordable PC audio

Really? An ex record exec said that discs will never die? Imagine that. ;-)

Look at your VHS movie collection. Look at Netflix plans (and actions).

There's no denying that the future is in file-based media...it's only a question of where you want to be in the adoption curve. For some of us it's now; for others it's never. YMMV.

And x2 the observation that if you're a changer kind of guy, file-based music is a neverending party.

It will be interesting to see in the future whether file-based media really will take over in the music world. You guys could be right that eventually physical media for music will die as well. As I said, though, this will not happen much more than it already has until rights issues are worked out. This has been a long process, and will continue to be - there is no easy solution in sight. And even though some of the technology is there now, some of it isn't. There will have to be much better encryption than currently exists, for starters. And then there are many audiophiles who believe that digital will never rival a moderately good vinyl set-up, and this is not likely to change in the near future, either. Vinyl sales in fact are the only music sales that are climbing over the last few years, especially on the classical side. This includes downloads, which are also down across the board over the past year according to the latest figures I saw.

Learsfool- I agree with you but one point that I would mention is that what audiophiles believe is meaningless. We represent a tiny fraction of people who have 180 degree goals versus 99.9% of consumers. Audiophiles themselves cannot support a phyiscal media type on their own. If that was not the case DVDA and SACD would be thriving. The fact that vinyl sales are up is certainly encouraging- I listen myself but the overall number of LPs sold is still tiny.

The number of downloads versus CD purchased is exponentially rising from everything I read. One thing to realize- it is more than just how one wants to acquire the music. CD buyers have to buy the entire CD while people downloading buy the indidual tracks they want. That is a enormous fundamental shift in how music is purchased.

OK - so...back to the OP - which system do you think would sound better? We have one vote for and one against the Rega...

And regarding the fate of physical media - until a good solution for lossless downloads is implemented, for a broad range of genres, I will continue buying CDs, ripping them to WAV/AIFF/ALC, and letting the CD gather dust in storage. I expect the record companies would fight lossless downloads tooth and nail, if they knew what was good for them.
My litmus test for purchasing the CD vs. purchasing 256 .mp3 on iTunes is - if I like 2 or more tracks on the CD. If that is the case, I figure I might grow to like some of the other tracks, this has been the case in the past.

Another thing about buy the CD and ripping it for PC audio - if, in 5-6 years, your hard drive goes t!ts up and you lose 50GB of music, you can get it all back. If the files are simply downloads, the lossless version may not be so readily available.