Tim in Los Angeles wrote:
You may remember my post from a few weeks ago regarding using a
computer as a high end signal source for a high end stereo system.

I have just built, with a lot of help from a computer guru, a music
computer. It sports a gig of ram, a P4 200 something, a big IDE hard
drive, an HP DVD/CD RW drive and a Digital Audio Labs Card Deluxe
sound card. It's connected to my stereo with a pair As-One
interconnects between the sound card and the pre-amp.

My electronics are by PSE a Minnesota company whose stuff is not real
well known but sure sounds good. My speakers are Nestorovic. I play
cd's with my Rotel RCD-991 AE player.

I am using iTunes to rip cd's on to the hard drive and to play them.
I am using the .wav format for maximum quality.

I see this in my future, but it look like I'd need 500+ Gb of
storage space for my collection, as .wavs. THe max I see
available (for a single drive) is about 500 Gb, and that goes for
$700. What hard drive are you using?

Songs played from the hard drive using iTunes (to both rip and play)
sound pretty good. But not as good as CD's played on the Rotel
player. Selections played on iTunes sound about 80% as good as those
played on the Rotel. The sound from the computer is harsher and does
not have the fidelity or detail of the CD. This is not to say that
things sound bad from the computer because they really sound pretty
good. They just don't sound as good as the CD player.

Any thoughts? Should I use a different piece of software to rip or
play the selections? Is there something I should know about ripping?
Any other thoughts?

Based on what you wrote, I suggest you should match the levels as
closely as you can between the Card Deluxe and the Rotel, and do the
comparison blind. You might
find that the 'differences' become much harder, if not impossible,
to hear.

--

-S.

"They've got God on their side. All we've got is science and reason."
-- Dawn Hulsey, Talent Director