Deke,
It seems in high end audio, especially with the level of gear Murph is using great care is taken to keep the signal path as clean as possible to minimize distortion and any external noise from entering the line and being processed along with the audio. I also have read and am trying to learn more about the importance of a quality transport feeding an external DAC (an area I am trying to better within my own stereo).
As good as some of the sound cards are for PCs (I am very happy with my Extigy) I don't see how a computer feeding a DAC could sound as good as a quality transport. Not just from the conversion of the data to a format a PC can read (as you stated there are some very acceptable ways of storing audio on a hard drive) but the quality of circuits used by sound card manufacturers, the noise emitted by the processor, hard drive
etc, the jitter control from sound card to DAC and the probable length of cable needed from PC to DAC would offer a significant hump to over come (also relating to length of cable, the sound card would have to put out a signal powerful enough to effectively transverse that much copper (dont know if fiber would provide a solution here)). I won't start the Microsoft bashing, but don't get me started on Media Player. Version 9 is cool, but still has issues (although it does decode HDCD).
With that in mind, I made my comment about the level of gear being used, roughly $10K, being too good for a computer as a transport. I plan on hooking up my PC to my DAC some day over fiber, but I highly doubt it will get much use.
Matt
