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Better negative than uninformed...

196.44.249.130

Posted by dave in gva on February 20, 2007 at 22:27:14

In Reply to: Speaking as a Prodigy 7.1 owner posted by Christine Tham on February 20, 2007 at 15:52:09:

Thanks Christine and Jim F.

I don't want to hijack this thread from Mose but I am very much interested in a similar situation (minus the desire to get into DSP).

I am looking to build the best PC system I can to feed a Lavry DA10 DAC. This DAC has AES, optical, and S/PDIF digital inputs.

So what I am after immediately upstream is the best output solution from the PC to pass a bit perfect bitstream into this (relatively) high end DAC.

I am only interested in two channel playback, and am not into audio editing, CD creation etc. etc. So all of the multi-channel soundcards etc are overkill for me, as are those that incorporate DACs and ADCs onboard. As I understand it there are two broad options:

1. A PCI board which could start at the Chaintech and go up in terms of price and features (most of which I would not use). In this set of options the Juli@ is a card that strikes as being well regarded and may not have the driver issues Christine mentions.

2. A USB-based external soundcard capable of passing a bitperfect output stream to the DAC. If I understand correctly a USB-based solution would minimize the possibility of PC noise entering the DAC.

With either solution I am not so worried about jitter as the DA10 will reclock the digital input.

Thanks for comments on these two pathways, whether there are others I should consider, and whether my understanding of a USB-based soundcard being potentially better is correct. If so, I would love to hear some names of candidate outboard USB soundcards capable of bitperfect feeding of a digital stream to the DAC.

Thanks as always, and apologies to Mose if this is sidetracking the original post.

Dave M

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