Grappling with PC audio

摘要

I read Mr Wood's response in the July pages of Sound Off to Barry Fox's April Opinion and have to say that things aren't as easy as they may seem. Having built up a fairly high-end system over the last 40 years I decided to bite the bullet and invest in an Audio Research Reference CD9 CD player in order to take advantage of its highly rated DAC and still enjoy my considerable collection of CDs. In anticipation, I downloaded several hi-res albums which, despite reading several articles on the subject, I initially found difficult to do. Eventually my dealer - Trevor at Guildford Audio Ltd - delivered said CD player and was extremely patient and helpful in explaining how to download music. He also tried to configure my MacBook Air so that it would play the downloads. After several hours, during which we tried my wife's Mac Pro and my dealer's own laptop, both of which worked fine, we could not get the Air to work.