usng personal computer for music?

thanks everyone , i just want to listen to radio, say pandora.com, which i like alot and other stuff, such as my local fm talk, WHAT, radio station into a small playback system. the computer is a gateway bought locally at store and i am using a linn music/movie into linn's small output sat. speakers with sub and i love the convience of simplicity, one box,music,dvd into sat.sub system, but i really like the pandora radio thing , where i create my own station. they sell the squeezebox and others, but just for stream music, it's not like cd,lp quality music anyway? or is it? i don't hear it , ofcaourse i am not using a dac, which i have found reasonable at pacific sound.,but in saying that, i believe you helped me by just explaining what i had in mind all the time....ill just stream my card into my linn, it should have a dac in it i would think?.thanks

Not sure exactly what you are looking to do but I send music wirelessly from my computer to my system in another room utilizing an apple airport express. Sound quality is ok but I am only listening to internet radio so not a big deal. I come directly off the airport into my pre-amp. I have been told that the sound quality would be much better if I came out of the airport into a DAC (like the Benchmark)utilizing a TOSLINK connection then into my pre-amp. I am not sure how much money I want to put into this so I am holding off going the DAC route for now. Besides I am in the process of putting something together for a cottage so that is where my efforts are going.

Not sure how much money you want to spend or what you are trying to accomplish but the airport was around 100USD and fairly easy to do assuming you have wireless networking capability.

Chuck

Perfect answer Michael. I started typing a similar answer and got distracted with Ebay auction for tubes and when I got back, your answer was here :^).

I think there are going to be a lot of people using computers into their stereo's as time goes on. Internet radio is great content wise.

With luck maybe internet radio will gather strength and some of those cool jazz stations will bloom in quality to replace the dreck that passes for content in my market :^).

If you're hearing Internet radio through your computer now, then you're likely hearing it through a soundcard and then to some typical powered computer speakers. To hook it to your stereo, look for preouts on the back of the soundcard to hook up to a spare input on your preamp, or look for a digital out (either Toslink or coax) and send it to a preamp/receiver capable of handling the digital signal.

As an alternative, you can get a device such as the Squeezebox which facilitates streaming audio from internet radio sources (as well as being able to create your own music server and play music on your stereo at will).

Hopefully that's a start. For any further information, it would be best if you could tell us what equipment and software you're using, and what you want to do with it.

Michael