Mac Laptop & Sound Cards

you don't need a pc, mac's have a much better operating system. with 4 macs, you can do a lot of cool stuff for a distributed whole house music system. you can share your itunes from 1 central mac, you can have each mac in a different room playing different itunes selections, you can use airport express devices wired or wireless to help in distributing the music, you can hook up an external dac between you mac or the airport express for better quality sound, and on and on. this is what i'm using for all my rooms except for my dedicated audio room. someday, i might put an itunes feed into it.

Ckorody and Rbstehno, I would be using the Mac as a controller with all the storage in the HT box with a AES/EBU lead going to the dac. It is John Tucker of Exemplar, a close friend, who has this running. My question really is whether it is easier and better with a Mac. I don't really want itunes running everywhere. When I am not listening to music, I like silence. But I suspect that using a music server as the source of my digital would great outperform my use of cd transports. At least that is what John says he has achieved.

What's an HT box?

Home Theater, it is just a chassis. Although I don't have one, I thought it was pretty common usage.

Gonna be better with a Mac - no doubt about it. You will be up and running in minutes - search this site and Audio Asylum's PC Forum.

Regardless of which platform you choose, you will have better sound quality (less jitter and distortion) then all but the very best CD transports - agaikn check the forums. The beauty of this approach is you can do so much more with so much less money - what's not to like?