[thedauntlessone]

I currently own a chaintech AV710 that I bought 3 years ago (before I even got into audio stuff) and I'm looking to buy a DAC soon.

I'm thinking either the Super DAC Pro (either versions). Maybe someone can explain to me. I know DACs are used to get better conversion results from digital to analog but whats the difference of running the DAC through a sound card like AV710 or through the USB?

Thanks

 

[nick_charles]

Quote:

Originally Posted by thedauntlessone /img/forum/go_quote.gif I currently own a chaintech AV710 that I bought 3 years ago (before I even got into audio stuff) and I'm looking to buy a DAC soon. I'm thinking either the Super DAC Pro (either versions). Maybe someone can explain to me. I know DACs are used to get better conversion results from digital to analog but whats the difference of running the DAC through a sound card like AV710 or through the USB? Thanks

Your soundcard already has a 24/192 DAC embedded in it, a pretty good one by all accounts. But you can bypass that and take the digital optical output, alternatively you can stream data from a USB port which completely bypasses the soundcard.

The data coming out of the USB is in a different format to the data via the digital output (S/PDIF) and requires a "receiver" chip to de-interlace it and convert it to a format that the "DAC" chip can deal with.

The one possible problem with USB is that it is prone to blips i.e dropouts if the CPU is interrupted by high priority system calls, this sometimes happens on my system which has an external USB DAC.