[Incarcerate]

I recently came into a large lump sum of cash, and am now looking at the Benchmark Dac-1 USB. I've been trying to read up on the means of using the USB as an interconnect but can't really find one. Bascially:

1. Does using a usb bypass your soundcard in your computer and stream everything to the dac as long as it's plugged in?

2. I have an x-fi gaming card as source, would it be better to bypass this anyway, as I assume it would?

3. Would I be able to stream sound to my soundcard without having to unplug the Dac-1 usb from the computer?

4. Would I still need AISO or WASAPI output to get bit-perfect stream?

 

[krmathis]

Let me see..
1. Yes, it does. At least for the music. System sounds can still be sent to the sound card (may be OS dependent).
2. Yes, and as answered in #1 it will be bypassed.
3. Yes, just switch output device to "Internal Speakers".
4. Not sure. Sounds like MS Windows "features", which I am not all familiar with.

 

[1UP]

1. yeah

2. if you're going to the DAC directly, then it would make a lot of sense, however you may wish to experiment

3. yeah, they're just different devices - the operating system/application can be told to use whatever is available

4. there are different ways depending on your OS; these are two of them