sound card and DAC

[witman1]

Is there any benefit running from a dedicated sound card (ASUS Xonar Essence STX) to a DAC as opposed to just USB to DAC?

 

[jcalleja]

It will depend on the type of USB connection your going to use, and the nature of your music files in terms of resolution,I mean, the soundcard you are mentioning is capable of 24bit/192Khz sample rate and almost everything below that,bit perfect at the digital output with reasonable low level of jitter.Some USB connections are limited to 16bit/44,1khz others can reach higher sample rates and bit depth.On the jitter side you have USB options asynchronus and synchronus with different technical approach and quality related to timing (jitter).For the price of the Asus soundcard there is a limited number of options in good USB connections to DAC, if you want higher sampler rates and 24 bits.If you search in the forum, there are several threads on this subject.

 

Hope this general info can be of help for you

 

[play-mate]

if you want ASIO (and that you want, if you´re quality concious) you need a soundcard before the signal is transfered (digital) to the DAC.

if you just connect to the computers USB output you could use the asio4all protocol. not as good as true ASIO, but mostly acceptable.

there are also external DACs that come with a driver protocol that is simmilar to ASIO but most of these are limited to 96kHz samplingrate.

the asus essence has also a build in DAC so you can connect directly via S/PDIF (in analog mode) to your soundsystem. the slight disadvantage of a build in (analog out) DAC is the soundcards dependence of the computers switching power supply which is not ideal.

 

there are many ways to realize computer audio and also many pros. & cons.

 

have a look at : www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com

 

one of the most interesting projects on computeraudio you find described here :

 

www.cicsmemoryplayer.com

 

kind regards

 

 

 

[witman1]

Thanks for the quick and helpful replies. At the moment I'm quite smitten with the Emotiva XDA-1, and seriously considering getting one. I'm really just waiting for some reviews for it. From what I've read thus far it seems that a quality soundcard is the way to go. Does anyone have any experience with a HT Omega Claro Plus + soundcard?? It seems quite decent and is a far bit cheaper than the Asus card.

 

[Jazzmangeoff]

Does anyone know what the in built sound is in a Mac Mini.

I ask this question because no where on the apple site does it give you any details of what type or make the sound card is.

I currently use the toslink optical out from my Mac Mini into the DAC in AVI ADM9Ts which does sound very good put can it be improved with a audio interface, any help with this would be much appreciated.

 

[Miska]

Does anyone know what the in built sound is in a Mac Mini.

I ask this question because no where on the apple site does it give you any details of what type or make the sound card is.

 

At least in the one I have it's a Realtek HD-Audio chip. Thus familiar from many PC motherboards. I don't remember the exact model, but it would be easy to check with the PCI ID's.

 

[Jazzmangeoff]

Hi Miska

Thanks for the quick reply.

Sorry to be so thick but can you tell me how to check with the PCI IDs.

Thanks

Jazzmangeoff

 

[Miska]

Sorry to be so thick but can you tell me how to check with the PCI IDs.

 

On Windows (for example with BootCamp) those can be seen through Device Manager.

 

On Linux, "lspci" will show interpreted human-readable version of the PCI device list, from this list it's easy to see the bus ID, and then from "lspci -n" lists the bare vendor and product IDs per bus ID.