cambridge 640C toslink

[mineralinsulated]

ok, you may have to humor me for a bit. I noticed on the cambridge 640 cd player there is a toslink output. I was informed by a salesman at a local shop that this meant i could plug into the cd player with an optical cable from my macbook pro thus having lovely clear sound????!!!! I would have thought id need an optical in to do that.
You see i'm in the process of upgrading to a Cambridge 740A Amp. Even though most audiophiles frown, i want to use either my macbook pro as the music source, or my ipod (the files are mostly lossless) So the sales bloke said that in addition to the amp, i should get the 640 cd because as well as being a lovely cd player, it had the toslink which would enable me to......
So i just want to know if this is correct!

The other question i had was, would the sound be better from the laptop to stereo via a DAC or go straight in via the optical out?

And in terms of ipod, Apple have a standard dock, does it qualify as a decent DAC?

thanks for any responses!

Anthony

[blackraven]

The optical out on the 640c is a digital connection that would hook up to the optical input of a receiver or amplifier there by using the 640c as a transport only. You would be using the DAC of the receiver or amp.

It sounds like you want to use your computer as the digital source. Therefore you dont need a cd player. The digital out on your computer would need to plug into the digital input of the amp and would use the amps internal DAC. You dont need an external DAC as long as the receiver/integrated amp/preamp-amp has an internal DAC.

Your salesman is an idiot or you misunderstood him!

[mineralinsulated]

exactly! no i didnt miss understand him. Thanks for your response, you confirmed my thoughts.

[Gerard]

If you are looking at an outboard DAC that plugs into the USB port, and the other end plugs into the amp, you might want to check out the usbmonica. check out the site. www.diyparadise.com/usbmonica.html

[musicman1999]

The 740c has a digital input that allows use of it's DAC and upsampling technology by other components.

bill