sound-card bypass

[rhythmdevils]

I have an apple g4 aluminum laptop and a pair of mackie hr624 powered monitors. Right now im just running mini->rca to them. But I have heard that the sound card that apple uses is just terrible. I have been having these awful nightmares about all these beautiful little sound particles leaving itunes and then these big mean apples come in with big swinging worms and knock off hundreds of the sound particles before they even get to my mackies . My mackies are starving to death because they are not getting the sound nourishment they need-the speaker cones are all shrivelled up. Its quite a bad dream. Can anyone help?

What would be the best (and cheapest) way to bypass the soundcard? a USB or Firewire device of some sort?

 

[rhythmdevils]

sorry, i should have posted this in the "computers as source components" forum where it belongs!

 

[Mr.Radar]

Actually, Apple's built-in soundcard is bit perfect (i.e. all the bits from the CD get to the DAC without any changes). Unfortunately, the DAC and analog output stages aren't all that great (but then again most onboard audio isn't) so it doesn't sound too good. Some solutions would be the Echo Indigo (a PCMCIA card), M-Audio Transit (a USB device), Apple Airport Express (the base-station has an analog audio output that works with iTunes), or a Slim Devices Squeezebox 2 (networked audio player, kinda like a portable MP3 player that doesn't have built-in storage but instead streams the files off your computer's hard drive). There are also a lot of other solutions (I know that Onkyo and Griffin also make some USB audio devices that are pretty good, and quite a few newer external DACs are coming with USB inputs) however these are probably the most popular ones. All of those should sound better than your PowerBook's built-in audio and all of them are also bit-perfect to my knowledge.