PC as a transport vs Regular transport or player

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.

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!