[moridin5]

I have an older laptop running XP and recently obtained a Musical Fidelity V-DAC. I have plugged the DAC into the laptop and plan on using this as a music server for my home stereo system. I have a couple of rookie questions, however:
 
1) I was expecting to only use the volume control on my amplifier, but in the mixer settings on my laptop I can still alter the volume using the WAV slider (the master volume control has no effect like I expected). Is changing the WAV volume an adjustment "in" the V-DAC, or by the laptop? I'd assume having the laptop affect the signal in any way would be a bad thing. Since the master volume control has no effect, I'm guessing the WAV slider is a V-DAC internal function and not my laptop's. Correct?
 
2) Would there be any advantage to a newer laptop in terms of sound? This laptop is about 5 years old, but works just fine. Since this is a USB output would it be the same basic digital signal from any laptop regardless of its age or Windows version?
 
Thanks much for any help!

 

[silverxxx]

The wav volume is changed by windows. About the laptop, well, many people swear by win7 wasapi, but others find it has problems, and still, you could configure win xp to bypass the mixer by using kernel streaming or ASIO, and sound the same as win 7. In any case the difference is very small, it hasn't been abx'd that i know of.

 

[moridin5]

Thank you for taking the time to respond. I will do some searching here and in Google about what you mean by using ASIO exactly, but in the meantime if you know a good thread that might explain the process to a self-professed rookie when it comes to this computer audio stuff lemme know.
 
(I can't get past the feeling that having Windows affecting the sound output can only be a bad thing; I was hoping the signal going through the USB would be an unaltered digital signal until it hits the DAC.