Hi, i was wondering what the differences in functions between the two topic items because a problem ive been having. when making music on my laptop, a toshiba satelite about3 or4 years old, its pretty smooth running at first. but the more tracks i add the worse the sound gets and eventually itgets crackly and fuzzy and doesnt really play at all. in one instance it completely neglected to add one track to the .wav mix i think because that track had a very in depth synth. i think the cause of this , if not low memory of both drive and RAM, is because whatever base functionality sound card is inside my laptop isnt doimg any processing of its own and is dumping the load onto the CPU. if any other diagnosis isthought of thatd be great. but if my guess is right i was thinking an external sound card or DAC would do the trick? i know in some regards a sound card is a DAC, otherwise you wouldnt be able to hear any digital signals.but ive read in more than one place that components used in sound cards are of inferior quality comapred to those used in a strictly DAC unit, which is perfectly reasonable.which would better handle this situation. built in amp would be great to because when a pair of studio phones is in my range im sure theyll need the boost. also any info on connecting, i know there are units woth usb and i know there are ones with optical line -puts which i beliee connect directly to the moboard. loss of quality ortiming in compariason?
thanks,
Looey
also new to head fi, seems like wealth of knowledge and smart people who care a lot about audio. excited to be part of it.all posts ive read so far have been informative and with perspective, as much asforums can be.
