DACs: Airport Express vs waveterminal vs mini-dac

Just as a follow-up: I find myself astounded at the sound quality of my G4 laptop out to the Waveterminal U24 into the preamp section of my 6900 integrated. I preferred the sound of this combo to the Apogee Mini-DAC (used both as a stand alone DAC and direct drive into amp). Don't get me wrong, the Apogee was excellent and I learned a lot from it, but it was not a significant enough improvement over the Waveterminal set-up to justify the 1K price-tag (I got the Apogee from Sweetwater, they are a GREAT dealer and had a 30-day money back guarantee). It was mostly different.

I am now auditioning the Benchmark Dac-1. Too early to say but I will follow up once I have logged some hours with it both stand alone and direct drive into my amp section of the 6900.

It has been fun!

Sent the Benchmark back to Audio Advisor today. I am almost ready to give up and just stick with the Waveterminal itself. I don't know what is inside that little box but it must be pretty special. I just got a great deal on a used Dodson 217 MK II-D DAC (with 218 software and upgraded BNC digital input). We'll see. Does anyone know what kind of D/A is in the Waveterminal? At $159 it has to be considered an absolute bargain.

I am in the process of setting up a database with Foobar and output from the PC to a Music Fidelity TriVista 21 DAC. I am feeding this to the Bryston Bp25 PreAmp and 4 7BST monoblocks to my Kappa 9's or RS1 B's. From the PC I also send a signal to the Electrhome 8500 CRT procector for 2 channel home theater. The sound is excellent as compared to using the analog signal from the onboard sound card. The TriVista DAC has had excellent reviews from many sources and am quite pleased so far. I've also tried this with my DVD player for the transport and the results were about the same.

I am wondering if the music might be better if I use a quality sound card?? Right now the output is from the Realtek 850 chipset with the latest drivers available to the DAC.

Any responses are appreciated.

I assume the TriVista handles jitter reasonably well. That leaves the question whether you are getting bit-perfect output from motherboard. Are you?

There are many external USB to S/PDIF converters, stock or mod, that can do a good job feeding your TriVista from PC.

Kenn39: I am aware of the Waveterminal as a device than can take USB out of the computer and convert it into S/PDIF or coaxial. What others are there and are some better than others?