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stvn758 you could also connect MDAC input to your onboard sound card output using
3ft Premium 3.5mm Stereo Male to 3.5mm Stereo Male. You would then select sound card device for playback in windows. I then plug my headset into out put on DAC. I have noticed a better overall audio improvement versus what I experience when only using USB DAC connection for playback.
This is some pretty lousy advice here. 3.5mm cable usually carries analog audio, although it can carry digital if it's an optical cable terminated with special/rare 3.5mm optical connectors. If you use ordinary copper cable with 3.5mm, you have just made the external MDAC completely pointless. You don't mention whether you are talking about digital or analog audio from the internal soundcard.
Thanks for the advice, guys.
Pretty sure I have some of those, bought some extender cables for my Creative speakers, they're 3.5mm.
I know my sound card has a digital out at the rear. At the moment I use a Toslink Optical to Coax converter that needs to be plugged into the mains for my third CD player, makes use of one of the MDAC's coax connectors.
In no hurry, just assumed a proper sound card would have less jitter and send a better quality signal to my MDAC than vanilla windows tech.
No, proper soundcard does not necessarily have less jitter or better quality signal. Jitter is pretty pointless to worry about anyway, since all modern dacs have jitter reduction sections, which reduce jitter well below remotely audible levels.
You can safely disable the internal soundcard in the BIOS to make things easier. That way there will be no programs sending sound to the internal sound card by accident, leaving you wondering why you don't hear anything from your usb dac.
If you want the best quality sound from the usb dac, you should use the usb connection and look into using WASAPI exclusive mode to send audio to the dac, supported for example by foobar2000 with its WASAPI output plugin. This way it will bypass the internal Windows sample rate converter. If you use ordinary DirectX sound to send audio the dac, your most likely letting Windows resample the stream most of the time, mainly to be able to play audio streams from multiple programs at once. You will loose this ability if you choose to use WASAPI exclusive mode. There's plenty of information about this available on the web.
You can use an optical connection to the dac, from your soundcard, which will also work fine if you use your soundcard with WASAPI exclusive mode. If you want to play higher resolution than 24/96, you need usb or proper coax without optical to coax conversion.
