[Bombo]

I really really want to pull the trigger on a Beresford DA-7510, but I have no transport! The ideal "Budget Audiophile" solution to me seems to be the Trends Audio TA-10 by a clear margin. However these sell for $180 AUD and I'm not quite ready to pay for this just yet, but will definitely upgrade to it eventually. In the meantime, can I get cheap, GREAT quality digital audio signal into my Beresford? I can see a few options:

1) I have a Gigabyte DS3P with Optical and Coax SPDIF Out. Will this be adequate on it's own? Can I set the onboard sound of this mobo to output bit-perfect / ASIO, etc?
2) Buy a Chaintech AV-710 ($40 AUD) and use its Optical Out if that's a lot better than onboard?
3) Purchase some other cheap external USB->SPDIF converter?

Please help! I'm especially curious about my motherboards output quality.
Also notable is that the Beresford apparently sounds much better through Coax from what I've read here, so that would be ideal if possible on the cheap.

 

[sejarzo]

First, try the onboard options, coax preferably, and then optical. There is probably no ASIO driver for the onboard, but maybe kernel streaming would work....and there is some evidence that DirectSound2.0 would introduce no, or virtually no, degradation in most cases.

 

[dogday]

Asio4all works for my on-board soundcard. I haven't measured if it's bit perfect, but it sounds fine and bypasses Windows' mixer.

Do a search for asio4all and you'll find a great how-to.

I'd suggest that you buy the Beresford and use it with your mobo, then try it out with other sources if you get the chance. My guess is a good DAC will make more difference than "perfect" bit-perfect.