[fmatthew5876]

Gave up and bought the ASUS xonar essence stx. It's basically serving as a $200 digital spdif coax out

 
You could have gotten a brand new motherboard with built-in coax out for less than that.
 
Instead of impulse buying like this, its much better to budget up front. You spent $200 to switch from Optical to Coax, which I think most people would argue is an extremely minor if no difference at all. You would get the most mileage out of that $200 if you just stuck with optical and invested it in a better set of headphones, or a better dac, or better amp.
 
I've used usb, optical, and coax and can hear absolutely no difference. I'm using coax with my pc only because I need the extra length and my mobo happens to have a coax out. My schiit stack is shared between my pc and media center/tv/roku. Media center components almost exclusively use optical so coaxial is the only other port I can use in the DAC. The point is that the decision is totally based on cabling and connectivity logistics and not at all based on supposed quality.

 

[zareliman]

   
i thought coax has higher bandwidth, is straight digital stream (doesn't convert to from electrical to light back to electrical like fiber), and doesn't have issues with jitter like fiber. that would have nothing to do with the dac.  i'm going off of what i've read everywhere, and the guy from schiit said coax > optical > usb.  so i'm just trying to do this right by the books lol

Sorry to come here late to inconvenience
Did he offer an explanation to why SPDIF coax would be better than Optical ?
From what I understand: Optical>SPDIF>=USB
USB is the inferior one for sure being more prone to noise and interference. Still you can argue that USB transfers DATA perfectly bit by bit (it's checked and corrected) so not sure why noise matters IF you already have a separate power supply and use USB only for data.
Well Optical is still immune to all that.
Then why would the S/PDIF connection be superior to that, it has a lower data rate, the phono cable used is subject to noise and interference.
The only thing I can think of is that for some reason the controller for optical input is of lower quality than the one used in the S/PDIF part.

 

[Makiah S]

I'll dig this thread up, what I found gave my dac the BIGGEST gain in terms sound stage and getting a blacker background, was a powered USB PCI Card. I found one for like $35, it really made a difference, and I have a furman power conditioner for my ENTIRE Computer, but that dedicated USB card was a nice step up from the onBoard Mobo sockets.

 

[Jimster480]

There is a card on Amazon which is $69 that has digital coax.
But I bought an SMSL xUSB.​