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Originally Posted by chobint /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I have no experience with that product...but I can say from reading that the general concensus around here seems to be that internal soundcards are inferior to standalone DACs. One of the reasons being that they depend on the PC's noisy power supply and are subjected to lots of stray EM fields inside the PC case. I can say from exprience that internal soundcards that I owned, even aftermarket ones, can be noisy but perhaps someone who has owned that specific product can chime in.
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This is true, but there is another reason to use an external DAC.
An internal soundcard will use the computer's clock for timing. Unfortunately the internal clock is not accurate. I'm not talking about the time down in the corner of the screen
When you see that your computer has an 800mhz bus speed, that means it sends out 800,000 little time signals every second. The parts of the PC use these signals as their trigger to perform their next operation, such as decoding the next segment of that audio file. The problem is the time between each of those timing signals is not steady. The time between each one isn't the same, so the tiny little pieces of your music get sent out to your headphones irregularly. This is called Jitter. I can't find the link that explained why it is like this, but I know it was intentional for a reason. Maybe someone else knows.
The advantage of using an external sound card or DAC is that it can create it's own timer and have very accurate timing. Some folks swear they can hear the difference. I've never tested it myself, so I'm not sure I can hear it. I suspect the difference in the amount of jitter is pretty small, but I have no idea what threshold is audible.
Getting it out of the noisy PC case is more important, but you could always shield the soundcard as well. This may reduce the EMI and RFI, but it won't help with the jitter.
You're on the right path. Build yourself a DAC. Not only will you get a better audio signal, you will have fun doing it
