| Re: The New Stereo System for Music. [message #86442 is a reply to message #86438] |
Tue, 31 October 2017 21:29  |
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gofar99
Messages: 1903
Registered: May 2010
Location: Southern Arizona
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Illuminati (5th Degree) |
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Hi, Playing music on a typical PC is somewhat iffy. Most have generic sound cards (actually chips sets on the motherboard). They are unable to really do justice to digital downloads. Thus the big supply (and demand) for stand alone DACs. However if someone really wants to use the PC there are numerous high quality sound cards that can be added (internally and some externally) to most PCs. They are not real cheap and many are designed for professional music applications. IMO if you find a likely one and it costs less than about $200-300 it is not likely to be audiophile quality. This begs the question if the PC is adequate to utilize the card. A 5 year old PC will not likely have the processing power needed. To fully utilize the hi-rez digitals now available and not be obsolete in a week I would want to have the sound card/device be able to handle formats up to 32 bit / 384kHZ sampling and numerous current formats. I understand that higher rates are already being considered but no music is presently using offered AFAIK above 384K. A better solution might be to go the stand alone DAC and use the PC only as the storage device. With hard drives so cheap now it makes sense to use one as your storage and the PC only as a sort of "server" to provide the data to the DAC. This too assumes the PC has sufficient power to feed the data without interruption to the DAC. Personally my main source is vinyl and I leave the PC to do computing duties though it could do hi-rez audio as it is a nearly new high end Alienware....
Good Listening
Bruce
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