Quote:Posted by: Burgermeester Posted on: Yesterday at 11:54:31
....I've read a lot of threads but have yet to hear anyone say that CD playback is any different from ripped .wav or .flac files. I'm thinking about a NUC with all the files on M.2 storage, running Linux to get away from all of this Windows fuzz. Audio PC only.
Ok, I'll say it: playing files on your computer is different than playing CDs on a transport. That seems pretty obvious starting with the interface to your DAC, USB vs toslink, S/PDIF or AES/EBU. But the question is what differences actually matter.
I'll give you my experience, as briefly as I can. I have thousands of CDs and dozens of SACDs and kept looking for my "endgame" one box CD/SACD player (because I didn't want to deal with DACs and cables, and at the time the only realistic way to play SACDs was with a SACD player) but after replacing several lasers on two different pretty high end SACD players, and starting to get into hirez downloads I decided I needed a different plan. I ripped all my SACDs and got a cheap Windows laptop running foobar2000 to play them and my small but growing library of downloads. And I got an Audiolab 6000CDT transport for the CDs and a Denefrips Terminator 2 DAC and I was really happy. Really really happy. I quickly bought an upgraded USB cable (Tabulus Argentus) and a linear power supply for the computer and it was becoming clear that rips of CDs sounded (a little) better played on the computer than they did played on the transport. There was no way I was going to rip my entire CD collection so the only thing I could do was get a better transport, the Jay's Audio CDT3 and connect it with AES/EBU. And it made a big improvement to spinning CDs, so that they are comparable with playing files now. And I'm done (with both my digital upgrades and this story).
So here's the bottom line, but keep in mind this is JMO/FWIW/YMMV. For me it was cheaper to get really highend digital sound from a computer than playing CDs with a transport, and if you have computer skills and manageable collection of CDs I'd encourage you to rip them and go that route. But if you're like me and at least one other well known poster on this site and have too many CDs to rip and/or no interest in computer based play back you can do really well with a transport too, you just need a really good one.
P.S. I'm no fan of Windows and have been using Linux since I was downloading the 0.95 kernel on 5 1/4" floppies and running it on a 386, but Linux isn't DSD friendly so I use foobar on Windows. I've tweaked the OS to turn off a bunch of services I don't care about, including the network and I sneaker net an external disk between my desktop computer where I rip/download and the laptop where I play them.
Good luck, HTH.