Quote Originally Posted by Feanor
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But never loose sight of the fact that if you deliver a bit-perfect, substantially jitter-free stream to you DAC, it doesn't matter a damn about your back-end hardware.

I won't offer a lot of specific advice; just a couple of things:
  • For bit perfect, on a WinXP machine, use kernel streaming; on a WinVista or Win7, use WASAPI. Or use ASIO if you downstream hardware supports it. Of course this means you must select a music player program that supports these protocols, e.g. Foobar2000, J.River Jukebox, or Media Monkey.
  • For jitter-free, IMO at present the best choice is with an asynchronous USB connection from your computer to your DAC. these connects are hardware-specific and require custom drivers on your computer. There are many opitions: a high but not absurdly priced option is the Ayre QB-9, (see HERE) ...

Yikes Bill.

I wish you hadn't posted this. I know I am crazy, but the bits is bits mentality (which it seems like you are espousing- correct me if I am wrong) just doesnt hold water in computer audio IME.

In theory you are right, but I think things are way too over simplified and jitter or some other factor takes over...jitter can come from all kind of computer things. Cics talks about some of the sources and different types on his site: http://www.cicsmemoryplayer.com/inde...n=CMP.03Jitter

Anyhow one of the async dacs you cite is made by Charles Hansen of Ayre. One would think that an Async usb dac would be immune to anything going on in the computer....but check out this post that he wrote about the subject in stark contradiction to your comment. One would think that if you were remotely correct that the manufacturer of such a device that SHOULD be immune to the computer hardware would be singing in the streets about how the computer makes no difference because bits is bits and the dac is async....but he doesnt!!!!!

http://db.audioasylum.com/mhtml/m.ht...Djesse%2Bjames