Quote:
Folks, a lot of irrelevant stuff going on in this thread.
1) Computers are capable of processing an audio stream to a degree of precision we can't hear from the source
2) however most computers have multitasking Operating Systems... they try to do many things at once (jack of all trades, master of none....)
3) A CD player is dedicated to only 1 thing and thats convert CD surface data to an analog or digital output. But they
are "hard coded", what you get out of the box will not improve with age... a PC is soft coded so software can improve over time
4) most of the PC case environment issues go away if you use digital PC output
The battle is getting your PC to behave as close to a dedicated CD player as you can... every unneeded process causes cycle stealing and jitter is audio fidelity's worst enemy.. And thats only the first half of the battle.... if you now have an unjittered stream ready to exit. you have to insure that the signal leaving the PC has integrity. Analog is very difficult to do in the small footprint and environment of a PC soundcard...asynch USB vs serial USB seems to work well for digital.
That's a lot of "irrelevant stuff" / misinformation right there.
