Need an external DAC recommendation for my gaming laptop (HQ stereo & 5.1 for gaming preferred)

Try checking some reviews on (all within the same price and performance range):

- Amb gamma2 (you can probably commission one from MisterX)

- Headamp pico Upsampling USB DAC

- Musical Fidelity V-DAC

Those are all $300 and are among the best performers in that segment of portable DACs.  You can't go wrong with any of them.  All are USB friendly.

Another contender is the Schiit Bifrost (ships 9/30, $350), but it's not as portable.  I haven't seen any reviews on it yet but it's async USB 24/192.  I would give it serious consideration given Schiit's proven ability to compete on both price and performance.

Schiit Bifrost should be really good but it is not remotely portable. If you want a portable one, consider the Centrance Dacport or Dacport LX if you just want a DAC.

I don't know of any 5.1 portable DACs.  The way most people manage it is buying multiple 2-channel DACs, but that gets expensive quickly.  I'm pretty sure all of those DACs listed are 2-channel.

You're probably better off looking into sound cards if you want to keep the price down.

Well, keep in mind what a DAC is :)  Every sound card has a DAC, otherwise you wouldn't be able to plug in a pair of speakers or headphones into it and get sound out.  All the DAC does is it processes the digital signal and outputs the signal as analog.  DAC chips, even the high-end ones, are cheap.

To get a little more technical, those fancy $300-15000 discrete DACs you see people here discuss here are really a box with a DAC, programmed chips that do a ton of signal processing, and assorted power setups (and the bling).  There's a lot more being layered on top of the straight digital-to-analog conversion, which is what you're paying for.  People usually prefer those DACs because they were designed to do one (or a few things) very well.  They tend to isolate the sound better (by doing their best to reduce any electromagnetic interface, as well as trying to minimize introduction of jitter before the signal hits the DA, etc.), the newer DACs have pretty good internal clocks (particularly the $1500+ crowd), they're much more plug-and-play (can you stick a PCI-E card into your iPod?), can handle multiple transports (USB, S/PDIF, Firewire, optical coax, AES/EBU, etc.), some of them do fantastic signal processing (Berkeley Audio, Metric Halo, Weiss), and it's easier to test the effect of a discrete component on your audio chain.

You've got Thunderpants so it'd be a shame if you weren't able to source it from a really nice DAC.  Conversely, if you must have 5.1, the sound card is the most economical route to go, particularly if you're capped at $200-400, which puts you in a pretty strict performance tier.

You have a couple of options, primarily consisting of:

- ASUS Xonar Essence

- Auzentech

- M-Audio Audiophile

(do yourself a favor and don't get Creative)

I'd just go for the Auzentech or M-Audio and be done with it.  If you plan on doing any sort of bit-perfect playback (WASAPI or ASIO), I recommend against the ASUS cards.

If you can find a used Lynx card that fits your budget, it will be better than the Auzentech or M-Audio.

I guess you could also go for an external sound card, but I don't really see the point.

A discrete audiophile DAC will generally be superior because it's designed to do one thing, and that's to wring the best analog output out of a digital signal that it possibly can.  A sound card is a multipurpose device that's sold on features, not performance, even if you're looking at professional brands like Lynx.  Even with regards to the well-reviewed Lynx AES16, a good USB-S/PDIF converter (Wavelink, V-Link, etc.) connected to a high-end discrete DAC will outperform the Lynx.

The problem with most audiophile DACs for gaming is that they WON'T have Dolby Headphone support or any other features they deem useless in their goal of simply converting a digital sound signal to an analog one.

However, I think I know of a workaround, in the form of MyEars. You'd have to constantly switch between selecting the DAC direct for music listening and the "virtual audio cable" for gaming, but it's about the only solution I can think of (other than buying an Astro Mixamp and likely being let down by the sound quality compared to an audiophile DAC).

The real issue is that it needs to be an external DAC, because for gaming purposes, nothing beats internal soundcards, with special note to X-Fi powered cards, while Asus and M-Audio just don't cut it for gaming, at all.

Elysian, you seem to have forgotten that the OP has a laptop, so internal cards are out of the question.

There is the Creative X-Fi Surround 5.1 (non-Pro version) that would fit the bill regarding portability (USB powered), gaming capabilities, low price and surround support, but its stock form is nothing to call home about. Although, there are threads around here on how to mod it to increase its SQ.

Unless you absolutely love EAX, don't buy into the hype for Creative.  Auzentech and other sound card manufacturers have come a long way for giving good support for game audio.  There's a Creative premium for the marketing.  I've bought close to a dozen Creative cards for various systems, so I'm not being critical out of bias.

Regardless, until you get into Lynx territory, anything in the $50-300 range will general be ballpark within each other in performance, so buy based on the feature set you need.  The main improvement will be getting off of onboard audio.  For desktop systems, onboard actually is not that bad nowadays with a good mobo.

I'm not sure why you think nothing beats internal sound cards for gaming.  External sound cards have approximately even performance, and it's all DirectSound anyway if you're not going for bit-perfect playback.  Unless you love Creative or ASUS's equalizers and filters, one is as good as another.  You don't get a computer sound card for audiophile performance.  You get it for the marginal improvement over onboard audio and functionality.

Some of us still play older games with EAX support. (I certainly do, especially with the help of ALchemy.) If your games of choice don't use it, then things become a bit more open for other manufacturers.

Note that I haven't had a Creative-built card since the old Sound Blaster Live! Value. My two X-Fi cards are Auzentech-built (Prelude and Forte, respectively), even though they still use Creative drivers; it is their chipset, after all.

In case you don't know Elysian, Auzentech's best cards are powered by a X-Fi chip, and guess who makes those... But I do agree that Auzentech cards are quite nice, and those that do have a proper X-Fi chip in it (which excludes the Bravura) do have the best gaming performance available anywhere. On Creative's own side, there is the X-Fi Titanium HD, the real card to recommend from them, which no Xonar Essence STX can even hope to reach, contextually speaking. And I'm only talking about regular games without EAX support, because if I went over EAX titles, Xonar cards would have as much support as onboard audio chips, but let's not go there.

BTW, you continue to forget that the OP has a laptop, so forget about internal cards.

Onboard audio chips? Trash, from top to bottom. But yes, they're not as crummy as they used to be, but still the bottom of the barrel.

You don't understand why internal soundcards are better for gaming than external ones? Simple. External DACs lack any and all gaming features.

"You don't get a computer sound card for audiophile performance."? Was that what you wrote? Then lol if you consider the DAC within a Titanium HD and an Essence STX to be marginally better than onboard audio chips. Perhaps you should leave the popular misconceptions aside and do some proper listening sessions with those cards. But then again, I forget that it's preposterous to say such things in public, after all how could a computer have even remotely similar sonic performance than dedicated sources *rolleyes*

Yes, I realize that Auzentech licenses Creative's chipset.  You did notice that I listed Auzentech in my bullet list above?

Auzentech's implementation is generally better than Creative's, and they've gotten much better about game support, which was one of the biggest strikes against them a few years ago in the gaming hardware community.  I have no idea how good their emulation of Creative's specific EQ functions are, as the EAX, Crystallizer, and whatever else they've tried to differentiate themselves by, barely get the press they did when the X-Fi first launched several years ago.  Regardless, the Xonar Essences and Prelude consistently outperform the Titanium HD, albeit at a higher price point.

I threw the manufacturers out there as ones to check out as I don't regularly keep up-to-date with external sound card models.  Out of all of them, it's easy to run through Newegg's system configurator to get to where you need: Newegg.com -> Computer Hardware -> Soundcards -> (filter by) Interface

I'm pretty well-acquainted with computer sound cards, as I've been system building since the 286 era, and I regularly replace the opamps and capacitors on my sound cards with Analog Devices, Black Gates, etc. to get considerably better audio.  I haven't demoed Lynx and other professional cards, but my experience with Auzentech, Creative, M-Audio, Turtle Beach, etc., is that an external DAC generally does a much better job than any sub-$300 consumer sound card I've run across, internal or external, purely on sound quality.

Anyway, I seem to have touched a sore nerve with you.  I looked at your profile and saw that within your top-10 most recent thraeds, nearly all of them consistent of you endorsing the Creative Titanium HD.  It's a well-reviewed card, but there are a lot of other options out there.

I usually stick some form of sound card in systems because it's nicer than the onboard, even in the case of bottom-line Audigys (some of which are basically rebranded 64s).  It's a great compromise for friends I build systems for who want good enough sound and don't want to spend too much, particularly with all the noise onboard audio carries.  But you're kidding yourself if you think the DAC implementation on sound cards come anywhere close to the better $300-400 discrete audiophile DAC devices out there.  Given the audience here, if this was a gaming hardware forum, I'd be giving the external sound card recommendation wholeheartedly.

I'd do things exactly the way you described if I was in your position.  I wouldn't focus too much on the laptop sound card, and just find a $50-200 good enough solution.  I looked at several threads on hardware forums for 2011 posts and your question comes up a fair bit, but no one had a particularly good answer, and there's general acknowledgement that there's nothing that interesting out there.  Consequently, I'm lead to believe that you'll probably end up getting the least offensive USB card and just living with it.  Maybe someone here in Computer Audio knows of a great solution, but I'm not seeing it, even from parsing other hardware communities.  I saw that ASUS Xonar U3 card cited once or twice, as well as the Creative USB surround sound card.  I'm not going to go into too much more depth since you sound like you know what you're doing.

The Bifrost and Pico DAC (not the integrated one) would both be at the top of my list in the $300-450 category.  I'm probably going to buy a Bifrost for someone as a gift to get them into high-end audio.  If you get the async USB upgrade for the Bifrost, it'll improve the ability for you to use your notebook as a source, so you win both ways.  The gamma2 is comparable to the Pico USB, but in shootouts, the Pico seems to have a slight edge in performance, while the gamma2 has a little more configurability and inputs/outputs.

There's always the vintage DAC route, which you can probably gets tons of suggestions for if you don't mind a used unit on Audiogon.  In this price category, though, I think it'd probably better just to buy new unless you're interested in a specific manufacturer for their sound signature.

Depending on how lazy you are, though, not sure how attractive having two separate setups would be.  The Thunderpants are a great set of cans, and I'd just put all the money into a quality DAC to pair with the Thunderpants, particularly given how it'll be a hassle to continually switch between devices.

One last device to consider is the Musical Fidelity V-DAC.  I haven't seen that one in a shootout, but the V-DAC gets consistently high marks and is $300.