I suppose I'll chime in here ...
having used my computer(s) as one of my sources throughout the past three or four years, I think I can come to certain conclusions based on my experiences.
1. using computers to playback your coveted music files while convenient, is not an easy task to get right. Your basic PC is a bastion for noise. Noise is everywhere. Noisy power supplies, noisy this, noisy that. Not a good place to start.
2. using expensive PCI cards instead of your onboard sound is a possible solution, though not nearly as good as getting away from the computer in first place.
3. logical conclusion would be to have a FireWire or USB output dump data into an outboard DAC of your choice. This appears to solve many of the issues I have mentioned earlier. Fortunately, several USB solutions are available, and Weiss is also in the process of releasing a 4-5k priced FireWire DAC in the near future. emmlabs also featured a new DAC at CES which utilizes the USB interface.
4. the issue with #3 is that you will need to have your computer or laptop running all the time as the interface between you and your music. Some people are fine with this, others are not.
5. those that aren't, would opt for something like a networked playback device, Transporter, Squeezebox, Sonos, etc. Naturally, these being mass manufactured consumer devices, sound quality is not a priority, except for TP which was designed with "audiophiles" in mind. Though of course Sean Adams, engineer of the TP, thinks the TP is about as good as one could make it, you can find his stories and such @ the slimdevices forums.
6. of course, none of the above even begin to enter the world of ripping your favorite silver discs onto your hard drive. I happen to prefer Poikosoft's Easy CD-DA Extractor, which does a fine job of being an all-in-one stop shop for all your audio ripping duties. Unlike many in the established audiophile press, I happen to at times prefer the sound of LAME encoded mp3's at 320kps over the redbook standard wave files. This obviously doesn't apply to high-res 24 bit 88.1 and higher sampling rate files. I can't explain it, don't know why, but that's just the way it is. Other then LAME, is use FLAC to encode, since wave files don't store any kind of metadata. I think there is still a ton that is going on here that we don't understand, much like digital in general I would say.
I have heard Dan's TP briefly at RMAF and CES and must say I am impressed, considering I am familiar with the stock sound. Dan's TP will be coming my way shortly so look for impressions and detailed info soon.
This is really exciting!
Dan has definitely another winner on his golden hands.
