I still buy CDs, so I can play the original CD in one of my CD players. But when I buy a new CD, I usually rip it first thing and add it to my digital music library, so I can play it from my foobar2000 PC based systems, or small portable players with headphones.

I do also sometimes purchase HiDef music from sites like Naim where I just get a digital download and no physical media. But I still prefer also having physical media.

Also having bought many CDs from Amazon over the years, they also provide a free digital copy of eligible CDs under their 'auto-rip' program, placing them in your personal library for you to access via the cloud for playback on your PC or devices like your Kindle.

Because of the sound quality and flexibility of literally having access to thousands of tracks at my fingertips on my Foobar2000 systems, most of the time that's what I'll select for playback versus using my CD players or turntables.

But I still keep CD players in case a friend comes over and brings a CD they want to play.

CD players can sound very good. I have a Sony CD player that was tube modified by Decware and also a Njoe Tjoeb digital/tube CD player. But I have found music played off my PC based systems can sound so good and is so much more convenient. I never organized my CDs and was always trying to find certain CDs.

And if you look at the cost of a very good CD player versus putting together a PC based system, which can additionally do Internet radio or drive bluetooth headphones, interface to your phone for easy search and access, to me it made more sense to do go that route in the end.

The external DAC is the part of the computer based system that can be expensive, but you can start smaller while you experiment and can always swap out just the DAC.

Also PCs over the years have increased in performance but decreased in size, such that some will now fit in the palm of your hand.  I think when you say 'computer audio' some people visualize some big, noisy tower computer next to their amp versus one of the newer palm sized fanless computers now available.

Encoding formats... WAVs,  FLACs...

My music library consists of uncompressed WAV files, which I rip from my original audio CDs using Exact Audio Copy (EAC). EAC is a free public domain program and basically provides a bit for bit copy of audio files off CDs.

WAV files can be like a factor of 10x larger than MP3 files but fortunately today's hard drives are large and relatively inexpensive.

I chose WAV format because it is uncompressed (for good sound fidelity), but also because most devices out there will play that format.

Also that's the closest thing bit for bit of what is on the CD and I can also always convert tracks to some other lossy format like MP3 if I need to.

I found what can take a lot of time is ripping your CD collection -- and its something I did not want to constantly be re-doing if I say wanted to just to go to a higher bit rate of encoding on an MP3.

The negative of using WAV format is it does not support embedded metadata tags, so my audio files names tend to get long because using EAC I write the file with the artist, album, track number, track title contained in the file name itself.

But if I were starting out today, another very good option is to use uncompressed FLAC which does support metadata tags. Nowadays lots of devices also support that format (though Apple does not support it, but does support WAV).

But like I said originally, I really do not want to re-rip my many thousands of tracks or hassle with converting files.

Uncompressed FLAC is basically a WAV file wrappered with the metadata tags.  There is also compressed FLAC, which is also a lossless format -- think of it as a 'zip' file of an uncompressed audio file.

But Foobar2000 or your music player then has to on the fly uncompress the FLAC file, loading your PC CPU more versus processing uncompressed FLAC or WAVs.  

There was a time hard drive space was limited and costly, giving rise to various compressed file formats, but today with drive space so inexpensive why even go there when you can rip your files once in an uncompressed file format and be done with it.

Small portable players and WAVs

Two small portable devices I use and very much like are the Colorfly C3 and the SanDisk Sansa Clip+ -- so if I'm on the go I can load them up with some of my WAV files and wear a nice pair of headphones. The Colorfly C3 has a primitive user interface but its the sound quality I most like about it... 

All I have to do is make selections from my WAV audio library, and then load them into a micro sd card and then insert that into one of my portable players -- I don't have to re-encode anything.  And WAV files are almost universally supported on devices.

On recording quality

Recording quality matters a lot.  Some music is recorded and mixed so badly, encoding it in a higher bitrate or nothing else downstream in the audio chain will magically save it.

To me some of the music that sounds most 'real', like being there, is very simply mic'd. As is often done in simple acoustic sets with just a singer playing a guitar.

I think part of the reason for this, is that a lot of studios will separately record different instruments in a sound booth and then later mix that all together. But all those instruments originally weren't all together in one space playing at the same time, and I think our brains can sense that.