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

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.

PC to Squeezebox 3 (via wireless router) to Bel Canto DAC2. I'll never again own a CDP.

Interesting the negative comments made about PC audio in this thread. My guess is that those posters actually have no experience with it.