PC as a transport vs Regular transport or player

There is a lot posted on this issue on Audio Asylum. With the right setup, many have crossed over to a PC based setup and will never go back. A PC hard drive is, by design, a much better transport than a CD player. The challenge is more the dirty noice that comes from the PC.

I have crossed over to a PC set-up and just can't see myself going back at this point. I was so nostaligic to handle CD's that I bought a CEC transport. But, I returned it becuase it was not an imrovement in sound over my hard-drive based system. Accessing my 9000 songs at the scroll of a mouse is addictive and sounds great!

I did not many but some trials with a PC, laptop and notebook, with CD's acquired with EAC and some traks even upsampled with dedicated SW. Then taking the USB and SP/DIF out to feed different DAC's and USB-SP/DIF converters.

My conclusion where none of the setup was even coming close to the performace of my Teac P-2S drive, with same DACs. Also my Sony ES999 DVD, used as drive, plays CD better than PC HD.

So I did stop my trials and will stay with mehcanical drive for long time.
Despite all the technical discussion arised about the many many issues of disc drives systems I think today the best on the market had solved all of them and perfection is not far at all.

While ihnerents issues with HD as source are not yet fully covered. One example is the USB inteface that on paper qhould be technically better than old SP/DIF but practically sounds (in my limited test environment) worse.

Maybe with some dedicated SADIE like pro workstation things are different, but I heard one of this in a production studio and I know why quality of end product is not so good...(and, as many,they used Yamaha near-field speakers..) .

Paolo