[steinba]

Right. I've got another newbie question.

An USB DAC seems like a great idea for getting good sound out of a laptop, but how does one get the computer/sound card to send the digital bitstream (music signal) to the USB port? Do the DAC chips come with a driver for this?

Does the computer need a sound card for this, or is everything done in software? Again: Is there a driver available?

Can I get this to work in Linux? If the drivers are supplied with the DAC chips, I somehow doubt it.

A DAC will be e good way to eliminate noise picked up in the PC case, but sadly would make my new expensive sound card rather unnecessary. It has a S/P-DIF output, though, so I could use that for getting the DAC working from Linux, but I'd have to have USB as well for using a laptop. (Laptops don't usually have digital sound outputs, do they?)

Now please someone take pity and explain all this to the stupid Norwegian.

 

[00940]

You don't need a soundcard to get sound out of the USB port, it's fully managed by the USB interface.

You don't need new drivers to get sound out, the basic USB drivers under both windows and most big linux distributions includes them and most USB hardware interfaces will be automatically recognized as "standard usb audio device".

 

[steinba]

Quote:

Originally Posted by 00940 You don't need a soundcard to get sound out of the USB port, it's fully managed by the USB interface. You don't need new drivers to get sound out, the basic USB drivers under both windows and most big linux distributions includes them and most USB hardware interfaces will be automatically recognized as "standard usb audio device".

Ah. That simplifies things! Thanks! I hadn't thought about that. I guess i thought USB soundcards needed special drivers too.

 

[00940]

USB soundcards with special processing functions need drivers. A more simple one or a dac using USB just to get 16bit up to 48KHz sound doesn't need them.