"Gelf" wrote in message


PC based hard disc players seem to be a common topic of discussion in
this ng at the moment

Has anyone any comments on likely sound quality compared to a
standalone CD player?

All other things being equal, the sound quality should be the same when they
are both playing the same data. The PC-based player could have an edge
because the data it delivers to your DAC might have fewer uncorrected
errors. This happens because playing a CD on a regular CD player is a
one-pass process with no opportunity for retries. The better CD ripping
programs will retry erroneous data reads, which can significantly improve
the quality of the actual data delivered to your DAC.

I'm thinking along the lines of feeding digital audio from a PC
soundcard via optical link to a standalone Musical Fidelity DAC, then
to amp and speakers.

The sound quality of this system would be limited by the DAC.

The CDs would be stored on the hard disc as wav files or flac
(lossless compression)

Been there, done that, it works.

My current CD player is a Marantz CD6000OSE

You just need a good sound card that doesn't resample or otherwise butcher
the digital signal. You need to be sure to avoid contaminating the digital
signal with a ground loop. But you said "optical link" didn't you? That
pretty well eliminates ground loops as a source of problems!