Storage has made this futile, but a nice DAC helps (Score 1)

While it has been mentioned that bits are cheap now, and that today's 2TB internal hard drives will hold 2,857 uncompressed full-length audio CDs, I saw one other person (posting anonymously) about a digital to analog converter (DAC). I don't expect everybody to hear marginal differences in encoding quality when the components on their computer sound card have 15% voltage tolerances. When you're taking 0s and 1s and marching them gracefully in to the range of 65,536 discrete values, precision matters. If you don't believe me, ask an electrical engineer for yourself. I went from a Xitel HiFi Link (USB audio device) to a used Stello DA220 MKI, and the difference was night and day. At that point the DAC was the weakest link in my system, which allowed me to fully appreciate the difference it made. Personally I rip CDs to the Apple Lossless format, because it's convenient and I like iTunes. However, I can also playback with foobar2000 and the WASAPI plugin on Vista/W7 for that 'bitperfect' output. If you anticipate at any point beginning to care about sound quality, I suggest you rip to lossless (or uncompressed) from day one.