Has Computer Audio Reached Mainstream?

[arj]

As this appears to be turning into a fairly general discussion about computer audio, I am wondering if anyone has looked into isolating the power supplies for each of their components within their CAPS or equivalent.
This seems to be a fairly big topic on the Computer Audio Forum (which sometimes gets very extreme)! I am planning to get two battery packs for the SSDs - one of which will solely hold the OS and the other used for playback and isolating the Lynx sound card with its own PSU. Not sure what all this will result in but the idea is only to reduce any contamination with noise.
I also have started unplugging my individual USB external hard drives from the CAPS in an attempt to avoid the drives spewing back any noise into the system.
Would love to hear if anyone else has gone down this route as yet please....

Staxxx, one thing to do is to have only one device on as USB..ideally the Dac. everything else can be wireless.
The more the number of USB devices the more spread out the processor time.

Also try using a separate USB card..the usual ones are not great. I foud that out with Firewire..the quality of the card makes huge difference. Much more than the DAC or Amp

 

[Staxxx]

I will look into a separate USB card. I used to have eight devices plugged into the music server!
The DAC is fed directly of the S/PDIF output of the Lynx card.

 

[arj]

I will look into a separate USB card. I used to have eight devices plugged into the music server!
...

The Firewire is actually a better bet in these cases..you can daisy chain them and each has its own controller so no load on the processor
else go Wifi with shared disks

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Also try using a separate USB card..the usual ones are not great. I foud that out with Firewire..the quality of the card makes huge difference. Much more than the DAC or Amp

Firewire audio has the added difficulty that some interfaces only work with a couple of brands of firewire chip. That has caused a lot of anguished trouble-shooting and pulling out of hair --- but the answer is often in the manual!

 

[bootlegger]

I don't know about HD audio going mainstream yet but having purchased a USB DAC and a small Windows tablet, I've my own computer audio portable and more "mainstream" now that it's free from my computer & home Hi-Fi, as I posted elsewhere on the forum:

I recently finished putting together my new portable HD audio player using a HP Stream 7 with Windows 8.1 ($100), a AudioQuest DragonFly rev.1 USB DAC ($100) and a pair of Grado Labs Prestige SR80 headphones that were also $100. Loaded the free Media Monkey app from the Microsoft store, as well as, a decktop version of Media Monkey to the "desktop" mode of the tablet. A micro SD card is loaded inside the HP is where my music lives and the whole rig sounds awesome, even with lowly mp3 files! Certainly I could have purchased a Pono player ($400) or the high end audio Astell&Kern player for up to $2500, neither of which include the headphones, so I did save quite a bit of $$$ and had fun putting together and configuring the system!