Howard, I'm assuming that when you play music from your Mac that you are running it through an outboard DAC? And given your profession and experience I would further assume that it is at least as good as Filterlab's Duet? Yes? Then that is really your source. No CD player, no matter how stable its transport, is going to be much more stable than RAM. No moving parts is pretty hard to beat for stability. So the DAC is the source. There are some mighty expensive audiophile DACs out there, and these days, to further your discussion, I'm not quite sure I get that.

I got out of the audiophile world for about 20 years, but I never quite left pro audio. I hadn't made any music in a studio in quite awhile, though, until recently. A project I was working on needed a couple of minutes of simple acoustic guitar, and because I play one of those, it was cheaper, by far, to record something than it was to pay for needledrop. I went into a studio I know that specializes in commercial projects, but records music on the side. All digital. I recorded my little bit, then the engineer played it back to me through his big Tannoy mid-field monitors before he added any sweetening.

It sounded like my guitar. Let me make sure you completely understand what I'm saying. It didn't sound like a guitar or even a '03 Gibson Custom Shop Original Jumbo with an Adirondack spruce top. It sounded like my guitar. I play it ever day. I know it as well as the sweet tones of my wife's voice (hi hon.). I just can't imagine a better reference than that.

What was controlling the timing of all the digital devices and doing all the conversion in that studio? Apogee AD and DA converters operating under the orders of an Apogee Big Ben studio clock.

Have you priced one of those? Street prices are well under $1500 USD. That's the clock that controls the studio that makes the music we listen to. If we're paying more than that for sources to play music back on, something is amiss. MHO. YMMV.

Filterlab's Duet? $500. And Apogee is one of those companies that trickles its technology down very quickly. When the duet came out, the word in recording circles was that while it may lack features, flexibility and balanced outs, the damned thing sounded as good as Apogee's studio stuff. For $500. That's just nuts.

Tim