Is USB overrated as decent digital source?

I have been studying this for a few months and there are several approaches. Finished products such as Gordon Rankin's Wavelength products, less expensive but possibly as good stuff from Scott Nixon, or the kit approach. Google DDDAC for an example.

I am presently using a Scott Nixon USB DAC (modified by me by replacing the output caps with some I like much better and running it from a battery supply) and couldn't be happier with the results. My previous player was a Naim CDX-2 ($5,000) and I have no regrets.

I see no reason to get a converter to go from USB to spdif and then feed that to a conventional DAC as there are one box devices. Some use oversampling so that is something to consider. The Nixon DAC as well as others have basically 2 chips, the USB receiver fed to a DAC chip. Some also use a single chip, a USB receiver that also ouputs analog but all of these oversample so I personally would stay away.

I bought a Mac Mini as my server with storage on redundant firewire drives and it is a cheap (relatively) and very simple solution. I tried it on a Windows system but it becomes very complicated, the best ripper is a clunky third party program that is difficult to set up and use and the best players are even worse as well as having to use additional plug in programs to bypass the Windows kmixer digital handling that screws up the sound. The Apple Mini is simple and has a remote to control your music library

Mr. Stepenson, I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying that the computer with usb interface isn't fast enough?

I'm streaming uncompressed data from my Mini to my USB DAC and it works just fine. In fact it uses the older, slower USB1.1 as do all USB receivers designed for audio that I know of. USB 1.1 is more than fast enough to handle wav files.

There are many misconceptions about USB audio.

The speed demands for streaming audio are so slow compared to the rest of the hardware that they have no problem keeping up. Even USB 1.1 is plenty fast enough.

USB for audio uses isochronous transfer and does not have any provisions for error correction. Even if it did error correction has nothing to do with jitter.

It comes without screen, keyboard, or mouse but just about anything will work. I bought a 19 in lcd at Compusa on sale for $199, an Apple keyboard and mouse. It will suppost a wireless bluetooth mouse and keyboard but I didn't see the need. When you boot up it it looks for both and won't go on until you plug them in, besides, you will want to edit file names and make playlists so you need a keyboard. You may want to go with a bigger screen as the mini comes with a great remote that you can use to control playback.

http://www.apple.com/imac/frontrow.html