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Hard drive storage still need good cd player?

Starting moving my CD's to my media center PC. I connected the PC via digital optic to my external DAT converter (proceed) and the sound is pretty good. I haven't done serious listening, I just did this for the convieniance and ability to have music playing without having to change CD, when doing chores or have company over type of thing.

So while I'm recording this to the HD, I started woundering, what is the difference with having the music stored on the HD compared to the cd it came on..? The CD is just a transport with a laser pickup that reads bits and bytes and sends it to the dac as accurately as possible. So if you where able to get a great copy of a cd onto a hard drive, and pump that to the DAC you don't need a 5K cd player. One step forward, and what if I could simply buy the music already copied with the best equipment possible directly to a file I could download.

For reference, I'm using a classe cd/dvd player with proceed avp, classe cam 200 mono blocks and bw 802 speakers.

Michel
michel_findlay
thesauce
21 posts
 
Hi Michel,

I use to have that same idea... I moved all my cd's into Media Center and planned using the digi outs to an external DAC and figured it would sound just the same or better seeing that it's reading from a Hard Drive. Unfortunately this is not the case. Try a cheap DVD or CD player and run it to your DAC and have a listen. Actually, burn a CD from some of the files you are playing off your HTPC so you know that it can't be any better. The CD player sounds much better. I hear that the Windows KMixer has a lot to do with this, but I've used ASIO drivers and Kernal streaming drivers that are supposed to bypass this mixer and they sounded better, but not as good as any CD player transport. I can only tell on a good system though, but on that system it is obvious. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks!

Ben
ckorody
643 posts
 
You've got the gist of it. Most people who have gone this route are a) really happy after they work out the details, b) have sold their $5K unite and c) are keeping the CDs in a box somewhere as ultimate back-up. Practically speaking, re-ripping a large collection is too boring to contemplate so a hard drive back-up strategy needs to be part of your master plan.
samuellaudio
91 posts
 
but using a hi quality dac converter like audioengr sells is expensive and doesn't save any money over a cd player. Also sonos and similar boxes tested haven't had noticeably lower jitter.
audioengr
3,282 posts
 
benmalan@comcast.net - Most computer converters on the market are not as good as Transports, but the technology potential is there to outperform ALL transports. My fully modded ($1280 in mods)transport is setting gathering dust because my computer audio is simply better.
audioengr
3,282 posts
 
Samuellaudio - please dont lump my converters with the likes of Sonos and "similar" boxes. There are no similar boxes IMO. If you look at what it costs to mod a transport, buy a good digital cable and the time and money it takes to re-write all of your CD's, the computer audio converter is cheaper, even if you factor-in the cost of a laptop at $1K. Besides, the computer converter will outperform even the modded transport with expensive digital cable plus rewritten CD's. I demo this exact thing at CES each year, and each and every listener prefers the audio quality of the computer audio converter over the Transport.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Manufacturer
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