Quote Originally Posted by Beirut View Post
Here's one for ya: if you play a CD, or any music, on your PC and send it out to your amp, the myriad of volume levels the music goes through - the volume on the media player, on the PC, and the amp - must be degrading it somehow. It's got to be cleaner just going through a no-volume-control CD\DVD player, no?
Ummm, depends. The real question would be how many stages there are after the digital-to-analog conversion. And how good that conversion was. Were the audio streams merged? Did a single DSP process both streams? How many wires did the signal go through post-DAC?

In some ways a computer is a much more stable platform than a CD/DVD player. It has oodles of memory and so forth, so it can buffer the data. But ... yeah, it all depends.