I subscribed to Audiophile and Audio back in the 90's for years and used to be pretty informed on things Audio.  Could hardly afford any of the stuff reviewed, but I was informed and made good choices for the stuff I picked up along the way and learned the right questions for deciding what would serve me best for the buck.  Then came the 21st century and my interest turned to computers.  Radio in this town died a horrible death and I got a puter.  Late in 2000, I stumbled onto RP's stream and turned in this direction for listenable music and new to me music no longer available over the air.  And there was Napster.  I had a source for all the stuff I never could find or buy or was put of print.  I wanted to find a way to listen to all this stuff without burning and playing via CD.  Had 80 gigs (mostly out of print, too) via dialup before I caught the virus.

The focus then shifted to how to get this wonderful stream to play through my receiver and enjoy it as best as possible.  It was a 40' run to make things more difficult.  I also wanted figure out how to rip vinyl and get it onto the puter in some reasonable quality.  I've been making mixtapes since 8 track days and when Sony came out with minidisc, I was all yeehaw, no more cassettes.  If it wasn't for music, a computer would prolly have never been more than an email machine and word processor and knowing me, I would just have heard about an I-phone.

Trying to play back the minidisc vinyl rips or direct rips from the receiver brought me my first taste of ground loop hum.  Minidisc was my first intro to spdif / toslink and I thought ok, direct digital and no ground loop.  That is what took me to Vaio's (have 3 of them) because they had the most A/V ins and outs.  And the magical firewire.  Nobody had toslink digital inputs in puters back then either for obvious reasons.  I drove salespeople batshit crazy about cables and adapters and what the inputs and outputs everything had.  Was Laserdisc and SVHS as well.  I have a dozen milk crates full of VHS ripped from Laserdiscs.  Anyone want them ?  I used to rip radio onto the VHS Hi-Fi tapes.  Digital frequency range and quality in analog, w00t.  I even made CAT 5 RCA adapted cables.  To me, the puter was the ultimate jukebox.  That was back in 2001.  Everyone thought I was nutz.

Fast forward.  All this stuff I bought in the 80's and 90's is finally wearing out and breaking.  My Techniques SL 1700 still purrs however and I have a Dual sitting on the side just in case.  Its time to go visit Audio Technica and see what they have laying around in cartridges.  Their national headquarters is a half an hour from the house in Stow, Ohio and I bought some closeouts there years ago.  Anyone have any links for styli ?  I have a primo buss powered USB D/A (ART USB phono plus, I highly recommend this, $100) converter from turntable to puter with a variable gain and turntable ground connect, so ground loop be gone.  What's more, if your receiver has no phono input this is great.  It has available ac power and analog and toslink in and out.  Bytes are now so cheap, I rip everything into wav and keep it wav as long as possible.

What I have ultimately learned through all this.

Unless you still have vinyl or reel to reel, everything is now digital.  The goal is to keep everything digital as long as possible and avoid conversion to analog until the last moment.  Once the signal is fed into your receiver it all comes down to the inboard D/A converter and inboard amplifiers.  Keep your cable runs as short as possible.  And use the heaviest gauge of speaker wire you can afford, manufacturer is generally unimportant.  Gauge overcomes most all problems.  Every time I make another jump to keeping the signal digital through another step to the receiver, the quality improves.  Cheap digital USB and HDMI seem to work just fine in short distances so far.  Analog interface cables, quality does matter.  But that seems to be more of a reliability thing.

Since I no longer play vinyl, I only rip it and I am ripping my CD's to wav, getting a new receiver came down to a few minimum requirements to keep me happy for at least the next 10 years.  THX minimum (not because I do the AV thing, but it guarantees decent amplifier specs and D/A conversion), fully functional USB in with wav file capability and Ethernet for streaming music.  That's what I ended up with.

The next to the last thing I have to do is install Media Player 11 with is DLNA compliant for the receiver (another new thing I had to learn about) and play wav straight into the receiver.  I am hoping that the difference is as profound as when I play a CD instead of listening to the same file through the puters soundcard headphone jack to the receiver w/ radio shack ground loop adapter.  Hopefully it will sound better than the CD.  I will report back when that is accomplished.

Thanks for listening.