USB DA recommendation needed

Thanks for the responses!

To clarify....
I have th firewire version of the audiophile and I am getting a lot of kernel panics. From the crash logs its pretty clear that its due to the m-audio drivers. I reinstalled the OS (10.3.2 and 10.3.3) and no change. I have nothing else installed.

Do you need drivers to use the USB version??

In addition, while it works with iTunes it doesnt work with some other apps (such as mplayer for watching movies).

Also, it often doen not work after sleep (and give kernel panics then...).
So its definetly not a card you can forget about.... maybe the drivers improve, but maybe not..

The apogee sounds great, but is a bit out of my range. i was looking at the <$300. My system is not that high end... :-)

I kind of like the idea of going 2 step (tos-links/spdif -> DAC) maybe if I can find a theta or another dac reasonably cheap.....

How do the stereolink and the sonica sound compared to the theta ? I guess I could live with the sonica for now until a "deal" on a theta pops up.

Anybody have any listening experience with the ESI waveterminal:
http://www.esi-pro.com/viewProduct.php?pid=10&page=1
or the Edirols ?

thanks!

the squeezebox looks interesting!
However, since I use the screen of, my cube to watch DVD's I cannot ban it from the living room. Thus wirelss is not needed, but maybe I get one for the bedroom!
I am leaning towards the 2 step solution (sonica-dac) or waiting for deals on the apogee :-)
A couple questions:
Did you ahve problems before with short cables going into the DAC?
Does the Sonica work without drivers ?
I know nothing about DACs. what is preferred, coax (s/pdif is guess), optical ? What use one is good for the $?

Thanks!

Thats bad to hear. I thought it was just the audio over firewire or the slowness of my cube (500MHz). But I guess m-audio just has bad drivers.
I actually just got an RMA to send mine back and am looking for a solution that works without drivers.
An additional rpoblem I encountered was that the audiophile seemed to only work with 44.1kHz sources (like itunes). Playign a movie with mplayer which has 48kHz audio would result in silence. I tried to change the sample rate in the control panel.. but guess what... it crashed.

Anyway, now I am looking at the edirol UA-1D or 1X. that would give me spdif and it does not seem to need drivers !

http://www.edirol.com/products/info/ua1d.html (coax+optical)
http://www.edirol.com/products/info/ua1x.html (optical+rca)

So:
- what are your experiences with the sonica ?
-what connection do I need for external "decent" dacs? coax or optical?
-what "decent" dacs can be had in the $300-500 range ?

I actually don't think that it is a Mac core audio problem since my Griffin iMic works just fine in all applications. It just doesn't sound as good.

The m-audio I had was a firewire card. M-audio tech support was trying to be helpful, but besides "reinstall everything" they couldn't come up with much. The kernel logs clearly indicated that the m-audio driver was crashing.
:-(

yes, the sound is superb!

Does it work with mplayer?

Also, I checked the m-audio website. The audiophile USB is supposed to work with core-audio in OS-X. Thus no drivers should be needed for USB audio out. Is that true ?
Any more crashes?

Thanks!

Does it work after sleep?

Would you mind trying it without the drivers? I dont want to waste $ on shipping stuff back and forth again.
maybe m-audio has an answer...

returned the audiophile and got a edirol ua-5.
sounds pretty damn sweet and needs no drivers for 16bit sound.
It is pretty universal since it has optical and coax as well.
Of course a week after i got it m-audio released new drivers for the audiphile to fix the crash problem in panther :-(

now i wouldn't mind borrowing somebody's theta to compare :-)

I got some emails about the current status....

So I ended up getting a Edirol UA-5. Setup way easier than the m-audio, basically plug and play.... and then I forgot about it :-)

Sounds great to and hasn't given me a crash once in 3+ months.
Works with DVDs etc., you forget that its not the internal sound.

The only negative is that i wish the box would be smaller, so i could hide it better. It has way more features than I need (mic inputs etc..) but maybe they come in handy some day.

i am now thinkign of gettign an airport express and hooking that up via toslink to the edirol :-)

i think you are right, the wabeterminal seems smaller.
what i like about the ua5 is that it really works without any drivers, thus the next system update is not going to trash it.
This was one of my problems witht he audiophile:unstable drivers
actually, the manual volume adjuster is pretty handy in levelling the outputs to other sources.