I still say that unless someone can give me a very good reason why not, a PC (of sorts) as transport with a good PSU and outboard soundcard, perhaps via USB brings more to the game than it takes away. You simply rip all your CD's to the drive and play them into the DAC of your choice, completely separate from the 'transport'.
My very limited understanding of it would suggest that jitter will not be a problem, nor will dirty or imperfect CD's.
Any of M. Barnes dinky little fanless wonders would probably be a good choice for the machine. They can run from 12V, which eliminates mains problems also and they also act as DVD players. In fact, if or when Creative come out with an Extigy 2, you could use it to play DVD-A.
Tell me if I am crazy.
Neil,
There are a few problems with the Extigy, and ultimately it does take away from sound quality. Also, there is a problem in the fact that to minimize timing errors of playback, one has to take the time to copy an entire CD onto the HDD before playback can begin.
Let's assume the USB interface itself is ideal - relatively speaking to the Extigy card the USB interface itself introduces minimal distortion. We can focus on the problems of the actual Extigy card itself.
While Creative has taken multiple steps in the right direction (as going with the I2S data transfer format over AC97 codecs), their implementation still isn't optimized for 2 channel audio, but more for gaming.
Here's a good place to get started:
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/extigy/This is an excellent review of the card, as the reviewer takes time to actually print out the performance parameters in a situation where the testing methodology is accurate. It's rare for audio testing to be done properly at these computer review sites, mostly for the reason that the reviewers are techies and not necessarily aware of audio. Focus on the 16bit / 44.1kHz analysis section, as that's what is used for CD audio playback.
Creative Labs didn't really focus on optimizing 44.1KHz digital to analog conversion; instead they focused on 48KHz so they could properly market the 24bit/96kHz fad that everyone loves to hype up. This is representative of an ignorance that higher numbers ensure better audio performance, which couldn't be further from the truth for CD playback. That, however, is a whole different can of worms.
Getting back to the Extigy, there are serious synchronization problems with the Extigy DSP chip and accepting a 44.1kHz signal - meaning the data has to be sent at 48kHz over the USB cable. Therefore your 16bit / 44.1KHz signal has already been resampled (meaning, jitter has been added to the waveform) in your PC to a 16bit/48kHz signal before the sound card even sees it.
Now the Extigy takes the 16bit/48kHz signal, and converts it. The numbers for noise floor and harmonic distortion in the audible bandwith are very mediocre - 85dB noise floor and 83dB dynamic range within the audible bandwidth isn't particularly impressive when using the volume control (considering similarly implemented players and $300 CD players regulalry have 100dB+ for 24bit, and 96dB is the theoretical performance for CD's).
Numbers aside, I used the Extigy when operating my HD-600's for a while, and often felt like there was a sense of the timing and pace being slightly off.
I think the Extigy is a wonderful product, especially at the price point. I applaud Creative for bringing the card to market, and the convenience and features it provides are unmatched. Also, the use of the internal I2S format is a huge step forward (versus the worthless AC97 codecs). However, the card just isn't optimized for 16bit / 44.1kHz playback that all audio CD's are encoded in.
Regards,
Rup
