Thanks Greg_R! Yes, the Fasttrack Pro has a volume control, and I see your point that two stages of volume control may in principle add some noise. I don't know what you mean with the two different modes of the audio interface. However, I just noticed that the volume control on the M-Audio does...

Audio: Mediamonkey, really love it (I switched from iTunes because of its lack of format support and slow behavior for big libraries) Video: MediaPlayer Classic

Dear all, as of today (AKG headphones arrived, hooray!) my listening setup is as follows (listening experience is much better now than it used to be with my old equipment): External HD -> USB cable -> Notebook (mostly lossless ape/flac files) -> USB cable -> M-Audio Fasttrack PRO...