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Needing suggestion on DAC

post #1 of 5
9/15/11 at 8:53am
Thread Starter 

I currently have an Auzentech Prelude as my sound card but am wanting an external USB DAC and was wondering what is the best option for ~$500 to pair with M-Audio A40 and also has headphone amp. What are good headphones to get also to listen to vocal trance mainly?

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post #2 of 5
9/15/11 at 7:09pm

Does it have to be USB? You could use the Prelude's S/PDIF output to feed the DAC.

 

But for $500, I'd expect any DAC in that price range to support both USB and S/PDIF input.

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post #3 of 5
9/15/11 at 8:01pm
Thread Starter 

I was hoping to get rid of my Prelude which does have S/PDIF output. The driver issue I've had with it has never been resolved and I'm just wanting to get into better audio equipment.

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post #4 of 5
9/15/11 at 9:31pm

Exactly what driver issue, may I ask?

 

I still have my Prelude, and the drivers changed quite a lot since it first released. As of the latest version, I can't think of any problems.

 

If you're not going to be gaming with it, though, you might as well just skip it (since EAX 5, CMSS-3D Headphone, and other such gaming features are irrelevant for your uses) and feed the DAC with USB, provided that it can accept 96 KHz input that way (some only accept that through S/PDIF). If it's USB-only, make sure it supports asynchonous mode (probably not too difficult given your lofty budget).

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post #5 of 5
9/15/11 at 9:50pm
Thread Starter 

Sometimes the sound just stops working and I have to go into the Console and switch to a different speaker configuration to get it to work again. I got one of the first ones so it could possibly be hardware but I contacted Auzentech and they said it's not there problem and would not let me RMA. They instructed me to just update my driver and it'll fix the problem. Problem still not fixed and they didn't respond to any emails after the first incident. I've been using the sound card for a couple years and tired of having to keep on switching speaker configuration just to get it to work. I started looking for a new sound card but I don't play games anymore so it led me to USB DAC and I'm just looking for suggestions for something at the moment.

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