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Best PCI (pci-ex) USB card to feed a usb-spdif converter/DAC?

post #1 of 6
7/28/11 at 3:53am
Thread Starter 

Guys, please share your experience on using a PCI (pci-ex) USB card in order to digitally feed an usb/spdif converter or DAC?.

I believe that having a separate PCI-USB card will give a better result than using integrated mobo usb-controller. I just don't know which one to chose :)

I've heard that those with NEC controllers are better for audio than those with VIA.

but it would be nice to hear a real experience from someone.

 

PS: please don't recommend those SOtM usb cards. paying $350 for _this_ is way too much for my budget

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post #2 of 6
7/31/11 at 5:15am

Well I'd look at some SIIG cards, I use one of their firewire expresscard interfaces and it's works really well.

But if you are already willing to use a dedicated controller to feed your transport, you should seriously consider going firewire.

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post #3 of 6
7/31/11 at 5:40am

What I have heard is using a PCI-USB card is most of all done because the card gets its own IRQ. As the USB DAC is the only device attached to this card, it might save you a couple of drop-outs.
You can try connecting your DAC to various USB ports and check if you do hear a difference.
Some say they do.
If you open the Device Manager and choose Devices by connection, you can see if the DAC shares the hub with other devices.
USBPort2.jpg

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post #4 of 6
7/31/11 at 5:49am

On Windows Vista and 7 IRQ sharing is not a problem.

The reason for this is that later windows versions handles IRQ's differently, rather then giving dedicated IRQ's to all high performance devices, a thing that never worked anyway, windows now uses high priority and low priority IRQ's, devices are assigned an IRQ depending on priority and many high performance devices will end up using the same IRQ.

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post #5 of 6
7/31/11 at 7:25am
Thread Starter 

i'm aware about irq issues, bandwidth issues and power issues. those are not a problem and are solved in my case.

what i'm asking about - is completely independent USB-controller.

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post #6 of 6
8/2/11 at 1:26pm

Originally Posted by Adda View Post

On Windows Vista and 7 IRQ sharing is not a problem.

The reason for this is that later windows versions handles IRQ's differently, rather then giving dedicated IRQ's to all high performance devices, a thing that never worked anyway, windows now uses high priority and low priority IRQ's, devices are assigned an IRQ depending on priority and many high performance devices will end up using the same IRQ.


What you see in the device manager are virtual IRQ's, in the mobo BIOS they all share the same one due to the ACPI compliance.

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