Sound Card with External DAC

You don't want to use the DAC on the sound card... whoooa, no! Junk. Get a soundcard with an external Coaxial (RCA) and/or TOSLINK digital output. These skip the cheapo onboard DAC (only meant to blip and tweep) on the soundcard and will send as good a digital signal as they can out to an offboard unit.

On the cheapo side of things, I have a Soundblaster Live 5.1 ($40-$50) with a Hoontech (Korean) daughterboard for the 5.1 that gives you Coax/TOS digital outs ($40) feeding a Musical Fidelity X-ACT DAC ($100), going into a Jolida 102b (coming next week - replacing a parasound SS setup). For very little dough, a knockout setup. Doesn't take much imagination, just get yourself out of the noisy computer chassis in digital, do the conversion in an outboard DAC, then you know the rest...

Mike

Roland Edirol UA-5 is a nice soundcard with AD/DA on a USB cable. Works quite well. Costs $250.

How much are you looking to spend?

I use a SB Audigy II, which has 3.5mm s/pdif digital out, with an adapter (3.5mm mono to mono RCA), run to a Theta DSPro Basic DAC.

It sounds very nice. Much, much better than the analog outs from the sound card.

Many sound cards use this 3.5mm s/pdif out.

I would recommend, when the oportunity presents itself, that you add a dedicated transport. Any CDP should be much better than an internal CD-ROM drive in a computer.

I may upgrade to an M Audio brand card soon, I have heard they are very nice for the money. Will probably still use an outboard DAC though.

"Any CDP should be much better than an internal CD-ROM drive in a computer."

Resolution Audio used a CD-Rom as their transport in their highly regarded opus 21, so this is not necessarily true, and could be chalked up to snobbery.