I have 1,500 CD's ripped with Apple Lossless. They are stored on three external firewire drives hooked up to an Apple iBook, which runs over USB to an M-Audio Audiophile USB and then an Audio Research DAC5 w/jitter correction. I have an Airport Express for the bedroom system upstairs, and through iTunes sharing I'm also able to play them on any of the other three computers in our home. Digital bliss :)
Before transferring all my files, I did a lot of listening tests with friends over to try and tell the difference between wav, aiff, direct from cd, Apple Lossless, and other various jitter correcting and upconverting DAC's. Apple Lossless was a no-brainer storage format as none of us could hear a difference between any of these bit-accurate formats. Jitter correction seemed to have a massive effect on "pace, rhythm and timing", and the upsampling affected the soundstage and imaging.
W9tr, why should ASIO matter to you? There's going to be no additional sound quality vs. DirectSound and you're only doing two-channel (not multichannel) so what's the big deal?
Before transferring all my files, I did a lot of listening tests with friends over to try and tell the difference between wav, aiff, direct from cd, Apple Lossless, and other various jitter correcting and upconverting DAC's. Apple Lossless was a no-brainer storage format as none of us could hear a difference between any of these bit-accurate formats. Jitter correction seemed to have a massive effect on "pace, rhythm and timing", and the upsampling affected the soundstage and imaging.
W9tr, why should ASIO matter to you? There's going to be no additional sound quality vs. DirectSound and you're only doing two-channel (not multichannel) so what's the big deal?