How I got into computer audio ...

A few years ago now, I had a nice old Marantz CD recording machine that, unlike most, was also excellent at playback. Of course this was not so fine as a CDS2 by quite a degree, though it made good music even so.

At the time the Lavry D10 was all the rage, and I was lucky to listen to a nice system where a MAC laptop [not sure of model] was feeding the Lavry. It was very pleasing, and got me to thinking about iTunes with its splendid user interface. I knew that if the sound was right then the operation of iTunes would be ideal for me.

So I sprung for the D10, which brought a different presentation from the Marantz's internal DAC, and was certainly more detailed using the coaxial SPIDF method, if possibly slightly less enjoyable on poorer recordings. It tended to bring out any sharpness on recordings like that ...

I ran like this for quite a while till the transport in the Marantz gradually went west.

I then experimented with iTunes, which is a free download, though I had strictly limited hard drive space on my PC of the time. The PC was on its last legs in any case, and would soon be replaced with another [fairly ancient] machine which is still with me, but fitted with an additional half TB hard drive for the iTunes music folder. At this time I decided to chop out the Lavry, thinking that I would get a posh sound card for the PC. The trouble was that high quality sound cards seemed to have eye-watering prices! And how do you demonstrate a sound card? And what if the computer dies? Would any expensive sound card necessarily fit into another computer. There has been a change in the mother board card slots in recent years I believe.

Though it worked [if only reasonably] on the PC's existing sound card, I had an idea that a separate DAC working on USB [so avoiding the internal soundcard] might have a potential, and inexpensive USB DACs were not hard to find via a google search at the sort of price that it could be put down to experience if it was a waste of time.

The first one was actually not good, but I think it cost £60 including postage. I had another go with the Aune, and by now the iTunes was a fully functioning card index type of search engine for my recorded music. Circa 550 CD's worth of music that could be searched sometimes with one word only in seconds flat. I now have a small dedicated PC for iTunes alone. I has a fan that cannot be heard and an external PS, so there is little heat to dissipate. The hard drives - one small one, and a half TB for the music files - never intrude. I don't think iTunes comes close to making a modern computer work hard. It is so quiet that I have never noticed the fan or the HDs.

But the quality that came by now was in the ball park of the original audition I had with the MAC and Lavry, but for a fraction of the cost. In reality I prefered the less expensive set for its ability to allow the music to flow nicely in spite of the differences in recording quality. Sure, it reported the style of recording, but in a way that did not emphasise recording technique weakness unduly.

So that was the recorded music front end for a Naim system, which is somewhat unusual in Forum terms. Nait 5i "italic" -> NACA 5 -> ESL 57s. If ever there was a system to be revealling then this is it, and it does! It reveals music like I never heard replay before.

So if there is a moral to this story, it is that it need not be particularly expensive to get into PC replay of music, not terribly complicated, nor a compromise on sound quality.

At the start if I had had the money I would have got another Naim CD player for certain, but working on a shoe-string budget led this way, and I think that is a good thing looking at it after the fact.

ATB from George