[illwafer]

Does such a thing exist?

I do music production on a Dell 9300. I have an Edirol FA101 firewire card, but I don't like lugging that around with me all the time - and it requires power. I find myself using the onboard soundcard to do a lot of the work...and it works fine. The quality out of the headphone jack isn't bad, but it isn't the best (noise).

The laptop also has a connector that has SPDIF out. I was wondering if I could use that output connected to a small headphone amp to have a nice clear signal. Maybe I'm out of my mind.

Thanks for your help.

 

[agile_one]

The Grace m902 certainly does what you want, and is used by many pros (note that it also accepts aes/ebu on xlr, Toslink, and USB for digital, as well as single ended and balanced analog input).

I believe the Benchmark Dac1 will do as well, but do not own one to say for sure - I'm sure someone will chime in.

 

[illwafer]

Thanks for the reply, agile_one.

That thing looks amazing, and it is probably overkill for what I'm looking for. Also, it is as big as my firewire soundcard. I'm looking for something more portable (ie smaller and/or batteries).

 

[SunByrne]

If you're really concerned about portability you might consider the AOS Flute 2 or the Headroom Bithead/Total Bithead (that's USB, though, not TOSlink) or the Headroom Micro Stack.

There are probably others I'm forgetting.

 

[dngl]

AOS' PACE is a PPA and a DAC in one that is pretty small and takes an optical digital and spdif signal. PM for more info.