PC audio is it the best next thing????


I've been hearing alot about pc audio and many claim that in the future pc audio will be considered the next best thing in the audiophile world, curious about all of this. Any thoughts?
chgolatin2
Guys,

I really have nothing against using a USB DAC setup. But in my case, my computer is not close to either of my audio systems, and I don't want to set up a computer in either of those rooms just for that purpose.

I think I'm annoyed that we have stuck with the 44.1kHz sampling rate all these years. Heck, back in the early '80s when the standards were decided, many thought the rate was too low -- and that's when a state-of-the-art computer was running about a 100MHz processor. How far has computer technology evolved since then, and why has this redbook standard not been changed/updated in 25 years??? It makes no sense at all to me.

The only explanation is that it would have taken money for recording studios to change the recording standard, and no one (that mattered) was complaining about it.

How many audiophiles would buy a digital amplifier that sampled at 44.1kHz? Virtually Nobody!

Maybe if enough of us sent letters and complained to Sony and Philips they'd change the standard to something suitable. But we all seem to be content to sit back with the attitude that we've got to make that old, inadequate standard work. Why??? If we doubled or tripled that standard rate even cheapo players would sound fantastic.
Plato, where have you been? They tried that with SACD and DVD-A. The average consumer wasn't interested. They sold a lot more music in compressed formats than hi-resolution so what do you think has flourished?

The audiophile community is behind you 100% but we are too small a group. Write all the letters you want. The mainstream consumer has spoken with their money. High resolution is dead as main stream product.
Herman,

Yes, I know all about SACD, and DVD-A. The problem there was that they gave the consumer a choice and charged appreciably more for those higher-res formats.

But what they should have done was just upgrade the standards and kept the price the same. Heck, if they can sell DVD's cheaper than CD's (in many cases) they could have done that. The problem is that everyone becomes greedy if they sense that there could be an extra dollar to be made. If a little company like Chesky Records could do it, how hard could it be for Sony or Philips to get the job done?
On second thought, I've been doing a bit of reading. It appears that Sony's Blu-Ray Disc might be the next best thing... It looks very promising as a hi-def format and should be backward compatible to play CD, DVD, SACD, and other current disc formats. The dual-layer Blu-ray discs are capable of holding a whopping 50GB of data (a regular DVD holds about 4.6GB).
Blu-ray players are not backward compatible with CD's. My neighbor has both a Sony and a Samsung unit and neither one will play a cd. Also, I have read numerous reviews that confirm this fact. Power up and boot times are extremely slow compared to DVD players on both of these machines.