I have no experience with outboard DAC's. Is it worth the extra money. I was thinking of improving my digital spectrum with a DAC.

I will be using the DAC with two items mainly:

-Sony DVP-S7700
-a donated PC from my Dad with a generic sound card. I will run itunes through the PC because I want the option of controlling my itunes library with my Ipod.

What is the deal with bit rates and stuff? I heard that 24/192 is better than 16/92 but then I read this from Stereophile article in 2000:

"Now I am sure. It is important to remember three things about all of these products: 1) other than making active the lowest 8 bits of a 24-bit word, no new audio information is created by any of these products; 2) as susceptibility to word-clock jitter increases with sampling frequency, it is always possible that upsampling audio data can make things worse, not better; and 3) no matter how good these upsampling products can sound—and the dCS, Bel Canto, and MSB products indeed sound excellent—there is no conceptual difference between them and traditional CD playback systems. I am now convinced that the sonic differences we have heard and reported on are due to the different choices in digital filters made by the designers of these products with respect to the number of taps, passband ripple, and stopband rejection (footnote 2), and to changes in the jitter performance."

-John Atkinson

So what gives. I am interested in the following DACs:

Grant Fidelity DAC-11
Cambridge DacMagic
Arcam rDac
MF-V-Dac

Confused.