[swalker]

Being an audio newbie, I still don't understand why there would be differences between transports. (well i do see that there's jitter, but still...) And my question would be that... if I copy the CD data into a "virtual CD drive"(wouldn't that keep pretty much all the data bits intact?) in a harddisk and play the songs soundcard with a clean digital out at 44k hooked with a good external DAC....well would that sound good? Just wondering

 

[bootman]

It would depend on the quality of the soundcard's DAC and how good the rip was.
It is possible to rip an image that has errors on it but that would be overlooked due to the program's or player's error correction.
Now, the thought would be: Can I hear any potential problems when my player's error correction kicks in?

 

[swalker]

my thought was that since the DAC on a soundcard is of a low, if not crappy, quality I'd bypass it and let an external DAC process the digital source data which in this case is a ripped CD image. Suppose if the rip was successfully done without too many errors and the soundcard has a clean digital out without upsampling, would it make a good "transport"?

 

[pocomo]

Yes, it would sound good. Megabuck transport rigs might sound better, but you'd have convenience and bang-for-the-buck on your side.

You don't need to store 'virtual CD' images to get lossless audio quality. Check out http://www.monkeysaudio.com and http://www.exactaudiocopy.de .