The brand of Q-tips you use makes more of a significant difference than the wire.

How reliable are they?

No, not for HT, just music. The reason for the post is to list some good manufacturors. The planer and and electrostatics are very interesting, but I listen to classical and prog-rock, so are they good for detail?

Please tell me you don't listen to Brittainy Spears and Justin Beiber with that system. j/k. Nice write up and very informative to us noobs.

I thought a realistic thread about speakers might complement the other 'money no object' speaker threads. Honestly does one expect to hear Tony Banks scratch his balls with those six figure things. Anyway, it would be helpful to get impressions of $3,000 - $10,000 speakers from those who have...

There are stand alone music servers that make use of HDD's but they are stupid expensive; i.e. QSonix and McIntosh.   You could do the equivalent by doing this PC->Digital Out->External DAC->External AMP->...

,... iPhone , iPad, etc. Great idea!

Quote:   That makes senses,.. thanks for the informative responses.

The Wadia 171i still sells for $600 vrs $30 for the camera kit, so it's hard to believe the camera kit equates to the Wadia,... but they both by-pass the iPad DAC/AMP,....

Would the Wadia 171i be obsolete given the camera connection kit (with a powered DAC), or would the Wadia offer better quality somehow?

Is there a difference between the much more expensive Wadia 171i (or the Onkyo NS-D1) and the Pure i-20? Does the Pure i-20 have Apple license to retrieve bit-perfect data by-passing iPod internal DAC/AMP?

Thanks a bunch Dave for that excellent explanation!

  Quote:   Why are you speaking of DAC's (Digital-to-Analog-Converters)? Again the OP question was about the difference between a MB and a sound-card, in sending Digital data to an external DAC. I undertsnad that the MB and a sound-card has a DAC, but it apears that the OP is not...

Thank you for your reply.   Quote: We're talking about computer audio here. So you're saying that the computer does not buffer "audio" as it does every other computer data? Say I have a lossless audio track that is 50mb in size and Plays for 5 minutes,..... a typical computer HDD can...

Could somone address that actual question of the OP, wrt difference between TOSLINK from a MB, and TOSLINK from a dedicated sound-card? The OP did not seem to be asking about DAC's, so none of the replies above seem relevent.   I don't think there would be a ratz-a$$ difference if you are...