ipod and dac?

I'm so glad this thread was started.
RSBECK wrote: "The Holy grail will be when you can get a digital out from your i-pod and/or your computer. Are you listening, Apple?"

I'm very interested in using my laptop PC and its 60GB hard drive as a storage device (not getting rid of cds yet, though). There are various PCMIA soundcards that offer digital outs, so although the laptop is bigger than the ipod, it's still portable. Back to the original question, assuming I rip cds using EAC or something similar with no compression, will I do well getting a good dac to link between my laptop and audio rig? I guess what I'm asking is whether digital audio coming off the hard drive, assuming no compression, will equal the output of a quality cd player or transport?

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Thanks for sharing Onhwy61. I guess the next step is figuring out what kind of soundcard to get that has digital outs. Since I have a laptop, I'll have to find either a USB card or a pcmia card. In the limited research I've done, it seems USB cards suffer a little sonically.

Looking around the web, I've been seeing professional systems from Digidesign, tascam and others that are geared to digital multitrack recording with Pro Tools. They feature a/d, d/a converters and de-jitter devices, and come with plenty of analog and digital in/outs. Digidesign, in particular, has a unit that looks pretty good, and at about $450 on e-bay, comes with Pro Tools. Since I'm a musician, that would be a FUN accessory.

Any experience, thoughts on these recording-based systems as a way to get a digital stream out of my laptop?

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