Hands On: Meridian Explorer USB DAC

These days there’s a strong chance that the heart of your music listening beats from a computer system—whether it’s your own downloaded or ripped content stored on iTunes, Windows Media Player and the like, or streamed through one of the many web-based services out there (or, most likely, both). You might even be wondering if it’s time to remove that relic of a CD player out of your music playback system.

My CD player seems kinda lonely in the stereo system these days, and if digital-...