MichaelR

Thank you all for the welcome! I'm looking forward to spending more money than I should, lying to my wife, and worrying anxiously over what I should get next!

Hey Everyone, This is my first post and I'm really new to the whole high end music scene and thought this would be a great opportunity to jump in with some questions. Some background about myself, I started my adult life as a professional musician (symphonic), decided that while the love was there the money wasn't and ended up working in IT. I spent about a half dozen years as a CTO and decided that while the money was there, the love wasn't Went to medical school and now I'm in residency for oncology. My stress relief has always been music and at this point with a computer and music background I'm working on a decent digital music library. While my business experience in IT has always been with PCs, I've been a closet Mac lover and when I ditched the CTO suit and tie I bought into my guilty pleasure with a Mac Book Pro. This is where I'm starting, and from what I can tell the next steps are getting the music from my Mac to my stereo and for that I need a good DAC. My biggest confusion with the whole thing is the what and why? I've never been against spending money for the right equipment and with my past life I have money to spend, but I'm not big into spending money, just to spend money. To that end why would I want a $1000 USB cable? What does this get me? I know that my Mac is built to the USB 2.0/3.0 standards and I assume that whatever DAC I buy will be the same correct? If that's the case and USB 3.0 is only rated to 5.0Gb/s why would I need a cable for double that? Also from what I've read if I use FLAC or AIFF 24/192 files I'm maxing out at less than 10Mb/s? Do I preload music on to the higher end DACs in which case I'll be moving a lot of files at once where I'd need the higher speed? Or is it all real time streaming in which case I really won't be pushing that much data? I appreciate the help!