Audiophile sound quality off a hard drive

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alanB

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OK this is a question for those that really know what they are talking about electronically (I havnt a clue).

There are more and more products/options available with regards to storing music (and video's but lets concentrate on music for now) on some form of hard drive and playing it direct from there.

This has a great number of attractions such as not having to buy CD/DVD stands, being easily transportable, not having to worry about discs getting scratched or going missing , making it relatively practical/easy/cheap to build a fairly large collection of music, just to name a few.

But I've often wandered about the fidelity of a harddrive as a source, because I remember in the early days how earnestly hifi mags and sales people would tell you about how problems like "jitter" would be overcome by super accurate speed control of the spindle and isolation from vibration, or how CD player X used a "bitstream" DAC while the opposition would tout their 20 bit conversion proces via twin DAC's.  We were told about how the digital components were kept shielded and isloated from the analogue circuits etc etc.

My question is how is this handled when one uses a simple hardrive as a source, assuming a high quality music file?  As far as I know hard drive manufacturer's dont care about many of these issues which were apparently so important then (in CD design).  A hardrive needs an operating system and processor to funtion, or at least you need them to be able to access, play and save the files (I assume).  Given the performance of XP on my laptop in which one can spend many seconds waiting for it to decide what its actually doing at any point, I have no confidence in the level of acuracy it may be capabable of in playing a music file for eg.  What passes for DAC's in that scenario?  Is the PC processor doing this or does the sound card incorprate DAC's, if so are there audiphile grade sound cards?  If not, what would be required to build one?  What about the all important (I'm told) power supply, is a PC/Computer's power supply good enough, if not what does it need to be?

Please excuse the naievity of my question, I really dont know a lot about the actual technicalities involved.  I'm not looking for a highly technical answer either (if thats possible), but a sort of simplified overview of whats required and what to look for in the future for I believe this will probably become the future source of both pure music and AV.

 
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