Hard Drive versus Optical Drive

Other than the convenience of storing, archiving, and selecting music through a computer interface, is there no reliable information to suggest why a computer hard drive would be a better source, in terms of sound quality, than dedicated audio transport of high quality with excellent power supplies? Convenience is a perfectly good reason for going computer-based (after the invonvenience of setting it up right), but is it really as good as what we have now - Redbook CDs (or SACD, DVD) and a SOTA transport?

Ah. Now I understand the theoretical advantage in terms of getting bit perfect reads, but it does sound like a theory that has little practical effect and is likely to be overridden by other factors, such as power supply and regulation in a quality "transport" - it does not seem like a reason to make the move to computer since I suspect that it brings on problems of its own especially with no audio specific connector standards, etc. I think as long as I own silver discs (2,000+) I'll continue to use my Meitner player. Now, if the world moves to readily available hi-rez downloads of the vast musical archive, well that would change the equation; but that might be a way off. The one type of "music server" product that does seem interesting is something like the Olive HD (I'm sure there are others)that can store the music on a hard drive with a nice user interface for finding music and make selections through your collection, along with a optical disc that can paly straight from disc. It sounds good, as long as it can perform as well as the best transport/dac/Cd-players available.

That's the thing Tony, we are not exactly computer illiterate or phobic and yet we (I agree) feel confounded; it seems like audiophiles are going to have difficulty with this until they make it really much simpler, and with some standards for best performance. I think the Olive HD as a platform looks great, just don't know how it would sound compared to my EMM CDSA-SE (yup, I sold the AA Transport and DAC).