Brand new, sealed box. This special edition sells for $199 from Amazon or Samsung.com. (First photo not mine, just shows what's in the box.)

My top two predictions: 1. Slow, slow, and more slow. 2. Various JS quirks and incompatibilities, especially relating to the WYSIWYG post editor.

The 0404 is a DAC/amp. I'm not sure if it has a plain line-out mode that bypasses any extra amplification or not. 1) The 0404 (and probably most other modern ones) is USB 2.0. You probably won't run into bandwidth issues. 2) I don't know of any other reliable methods for testing. There's a...

The best way to test if you're getting bit-perfect output is to hook your computer's digital output up to a home theater receiver and play a DTS CD. If the receiver recognizes it as a DTS stream and plays it, then you've got proper bit-perfect output. If not, it'll either play noise or not play...

There's several different setups that can get digital audio out of your system. If your motherboard's S/PDIF supports passing a bit-perfect digital signal, then there's really no reason for you to use anything else. And yeah, if you use a USB-based system, it's basically just using a USB...

If all you're doing is using the digital output to hookup to an external DAC, you'd be just as well off with a $25 soundcard that supports bit-perfect output. A card with digital outs supported by the open source cmediadrivers would be fine. The only thing you really miss with those drivers is...

Quote: Originally Posted by Headdie BTW, what's a VST plugin? Is it compatible with a media player like Foobar? VST is a DSP plugin format mainly associated with professional sound studio apps. I don't know about fb2k, but I know that there's a wrapper plugin that lets them be...

You're right in that if all you're playing is 16/44 audio as is, there's not much need for a card/chip/whatever that supports higher resolution. A DAC that supports higher resolutions may or may not be better at 16/44 audio than one that only supports 16/44. As for resampling to a higher...

Quote: Originally Posted by lordmozilla nah seriously i was harsh, i'd RMA it if i was you, or just ebay it. You should be able to get pretty much all your money back. Depends what the OP paid for it. If he paid something around the retail cost for one of these cards (Newegg...

Quote: Originally Posted by western120 3) How the heck do you pronounce scrumdidlyumptious.. Didn't you ever see Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory? (Though he did slightly misspell scrumdidilyumptious, I can understand if that threw you off. )

Quote: Originally Posted by FallenAngel Why flash? AV-710 supports bit-perfect with VIA 4.73 drivers. Last I'd checked, getting bit-perfect with an unflashed AV-710 was kind of a hit-or-miss affair that required some funky driver tweaks that not everyone could even get to work...

And another one here. I've been running an AV-710 flashed with Prodigy firmware for a few years, but it just died on me. My caveat is that although I'm far from a hardcore gamer, I'd still like to have basic support for DSound3D & EAX, which those cmedia drivers and most of the USB drivers don't...

If the 2150 works OK with a new fuse, that's not too bad. I think I gave $85 for my 3020.

If it's dirt cheap (say about what you could build a basic cmoy for), you might as well grab it, but honestly I don't think the headphone out on my 3020 is anything special. Not bad with my Audio Technicas, but awful with my Beyer DT-770 250s. (It may just not like the high impedance of the Beyers.)

If I'm not mistaken, the 1020A is a preamp only. The 1020 was the preamp of the series, the 2020 was the power amp, and the 3020 was the integrated amp.