Used Rega Planet or Apollo vs. affordable PC audio

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.

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.

My litmus test is exactly the same. Ill be honest- I cant hear any meaningful difference between 256k AAC and lossless but I do rip to ALAC because who knows what playback technology might offer better resolution in the future. However, my reservations on buying 256k aac from iTunes are very few these days. I love the 24bit stuff and find it far superior to anything 16 bit but the catalog just isn't there yet.

In regards to a drive failing- I think it is easier to implement a disaster recovery solution that keep all the CDs around. A second hard drive or even RAID setup with some inexpensive software is easily had. Keep a 3rd HD that is updated occaisonally at a friends place if you really want to get crazy.

I think that PC audio is the best thing to happen to audiophiles in a long while- maybe even ever.