iMac to DAC via 3.5 mini-phono jack/RCA IC?

do yourself a favor and get a jitter remover device and hook this up wih a good toslink cable with the mini adapter (sold at fry's for $2) from your imac. then use the best coax digital cable you can afford to hook this jitter device to your external dac. i was impressed when i 1st went from the imac into a dac, but there was a huge jump when i inserted the jitter device between the computer and the dac.

restock - the output on the mac can be for analog or digital. if you buy the cheap mini-to-rca cable from monster, you will get analog. if you get a quality toslink cable and buy the mini adapter for it, you will then have a digital cable. what happens is this mini-toslink adapter is a little longer and allows the digital signal to come thru. i use this method in my setups. the mini to rca sounds terrible.

its interesting that you think benchmark dac w/usb was far better using the usb connection. all the reviews indicated that the usb connection was inferior to the coax and toslink connections. i also listened to the benchmark and the bel canto dacs with usb connections and they were inferior to the coax and toslink connections. i preferred the bel canto over the benchmark. but i also preferred other dacs over the benchmark but they cost much more. also, these more expensive dacs only use glass,coax,toslink, and bnc, no usb with good reason.

if you want a quality dac using usb, check out the new audio research or ps audio dacs. i heard the ar at rmaf and it sounded very nice. did not do any comparisons with the other connections but the rep told me that they designed the dac to make the usb connection every bit as good as the other connections, something that the prior vendors didn't do. i also talked to ps audio at rmaf and they were working on their latest usb dac.

i had the same opinion about the benchmark dac. stereophile loves it because they probably get $$$$$ for advertisements. there are many other dacs out there that are much better. i liked my old cal audio sigma II tube dac better and that was $200.

for my music server system, i isolate the computer from the music by using the airport express units. i also have hooked up my mac mini and now a 24" imac using optical cables to jitter devices. using optical cables, you isolate any computer noise that would be possible to transfer thru copper.

i also have played with the sooloos system. what a waste of $$$ IMO. you get a decent interface and thats about it. my iphone remote app does a better job at presenting music anywhere in my house than the sooloos does. and when you cost out the sooloos system with the appropriate setup to make it fault tolerant (raid setup), able to perform backups, whole house server, terabytes worth of storage, you are approaching $20k+ and it contains a terrible dac (that might be updated by now). again, IMO.

restock - i agree with you. each time i hooked up either a computer or the AE to an external dac, it was ok, not great. but when i inserted a jitter device in the middle, and started to use a better decoder on itunes, both together, made a huge difference but at a cost of using 3 times the disk space.