DAC in player vs DAC in computer.

They do the same thing. Just the one in the computer is usually really, really poor quality.

The former reads of of an optical drive in real time, the latter off of a a hard disk in bursts with error correction. Other than that, not much from what I understand.

Do you know if anyone has tried a DTI between their DAC and computer. For those of you who never heard of a Digital Transmission Interface, it re-clocked the digits; and they raised the quality of almost whichever DAC they were used with.

They do the same thing. However, an external DAC that can be used with a computer can be much higher quality than any CD player. Soundcards or motherboard implementations of DACs are usually poor quality and suffer from the poor power quality in the computer. This is why it is best to get an external DAC that is independent of the computer.

Like the CD player, the most important part of this equation is the master clock. There is one or more in the CD player and there is one or more in the computer interface of the external DAC. This is actually more important than the DAC itself.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio