PC as a transport vs Regular transport or player

I tried it. Most USB to DAC's can't touch the quality of even a mid line cd player. I couldn't find an external computer USB that even came close in quality to my pioneer dvd player's sound.
The only other option is USB to something like the Live24 external DAC and use the toslink out on the DAC to a quality D/A-that's 1 usb cable, then 1 toslink cable, then a pair of coax cables. What a mess.

There is a lot posted on this issue on Audio Asylum. With the right setup, many have crossed over to a PC based setup and will never go back. A PC hard drive is, by design, a much better transport than a CD player. The challenge is more the dirty noice that comes from the PC.

It is important to distinguish something here. Using a laptop as an interface and the hard-drive as the transport is different than putting a disc into the computer and listening to the computer playing the disc.

I agree that the computer playing the disc is not worthwhile at all. But the music file being played via hard-drive through a quality DAC, sounds as good, if not better, to me, than some pretty nice transports/CD Players. I have commented on this before and there are other threads on this here at Audiogon.

My hard-dive base system played only through a U24 Waveterminal (as the D/A) sounded as good on rebook as my McIntosh 205 changer and a Sony XA777ES.

Virtually every recording made in the past 3 years was at some point recorded/processed/mixed or mastered on a hard drive type audio system. That covers the horrid sounding pop/rock releases as well as audiophile favs. Properly setup they are the equal of high quality dedicated CD transports.

I have crossed over to a PC set-up and just can't see myself going back at this point. I was so nostaligic to handle CD's that I bought a CEC transport. But, I returned it becuase it was not an imrovement in sound over my hard-drive based system. Accessing my 9000 songs at the scroll of a mouse is addictive and sounds great!

I did not many but some trials with a PC, laptop and notebook, with CD's acquired with EAC and some traks even upsampled with dedicated SW. Then taking the USB and SP/DIF out to feed different DAC's and USB-SP/DIF converters.

My conclusion where none of the setup was even coming close to the performace of my Teac P-2S drive, with same DACs. Also my Sony ES999 DVD, used as drive, plays CD better than PC HD.

So I did stop my trials and will stay with mehcanical drive for long time.
Despite all the technical discussion arised about the many many issues of disc drives systems I think today the best on the market had solved all of them and perfection is not far at all.

While ihnerents issues with HD as source are not yet fully covered. One example is the USB inteface that on paper qhould be technically better than old SP/DIF but practically sounds (in my limited test environment) worse.

Maybe with some dedicated SADIE like pro workstation things are different, but I heard one of this in a production studio and I know why quality of end product is not so good...(and, as many,they used Yamaha near-field speakers..) .

Paolo