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I have a Sound Blaster Live! 24 -bit sound card and am presently running a 10' coax cable with a gold plated Radio Shack Mono RCA to 1/8" headphone adapter between the digital output of the Sound card into the digital input on my Resolution Audio Opus 21 CDP. I have nearly 80 GB of lossless digital audio stored on the HDD and want to be able to play from the PC with the best sound possible.Would a Sound card upgrade really afford me a noticeable improvement in the sound?
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The Julia@ has tested as good in digital output as the Lynx. $140 or less US.I use it for analog and the drivers are clean and no-hassle.
http://www.hagtech.com/hagusb.html
If this device isn't better than any "sound card" solution I'd sure like to know why.
M,If you want higher bit and sample rates than 16/48khz, I don't think this is the ticket.
You might consider buying a sound card that has a coax digital output and supports 96Khz I/O since that is what the digital input of your CDP will accept.The M-Audio Audiophile 2496 has what you need, as well as good ASIO drivers for a very reasonable amount of money. There are many other fine sound cards as well (for more money), but since you will be using the digital output you don't really need to be concerned with the quality of the digital to analog converters. If you use Foobar 2000 as your media player you can play with upsampling to 96Khz with the secret rabbit code plugin, although there are differing opinions as to the quality of what upsampling does to the signal.
I have used both the SoundBlaster Live and have two M-Audio products. The M-Audio are a step up in sound quality. I am in the North East U.S. also, so if you are anywhere close to me you can borrow one of my extras to try before you buy.
The MAudio is a mediocre card does does not give you the best. Go for an RME or Lynx. Cheap cards are just a way of dripping money, in the long run.MAudio is known for driver problems, and I have come across these. Poor support as well.
I am using M-Audio DIO2496 cards or many years and they seem to work extremely well.The ASIO driver provide for bit tranparent digital output, they automatically switch between DD/DTS movie tracks and any supported PC bitrate and as a bonus you can play WAV and ASIO in parallel.
My second bets choice would be the ESI-pro Juli@. I can't see alot of value buying a sound card with
Cheers
Fmak said: "The MAudio is a mediocre card does does not give you the best. Go for an RME or Lynx. Cheap cards are just a way of dripping money, in the long run.MAudio is known for driver problems, and I have come across these. Poor support as well."
The above is from a guy who, if memory serves me correctly, has a DCS DAC that cost more than my car. I use an M-Audio 24/96 card with no problems. Also in the same price range is Terretec 2496 and Emu 0404.I also use the Terretec with no problems. Just ordered a Emu 0404, havn't received it yet. I'm sure all of these would be a decent step up from Creative.
Enjoy,
The M-Audio cards I have used (internal PCI) worked flawlessly with both MME and ASIO 2.0 drivers under Windows XP, as well as with the ALSA Envy24 drivers / low latency JACK server / real-time kernel module under Linux. I have used the cards for both music playback and multi-track recording under both operating systems without problems.M-Audio may well be mediocre compared to the Lynx and RME products. I can't say because I haven't compared them directly (yet). I don't particularly care for the sound of the M-Audio internal DACs, but I do like the sound of the internal ADCs, particularly when recording at 96Khz and using libsamplerate to down sample to 44.1. The DACs are, however, better sounding than the Creative cards and include much better ASIO driver support.
If a person is not ready to spend six hundred to one thousand dollars on a sound card, I think reasonably good results can be had for the seventy five dollar street price of the M-Audio 24/96; particularly if, as in ArdRi's case, only the digital output will be used instead of the internal DACs. I'll have a better opinion in a couple days because I just ordered a LynxTwo. I'll be able to compare the two directly and return the Lynx if it does not offer a noticable improvement.
I have compared the M Audio with Terratec2496, RME96/8, LynxAES16 using spdif output. The MAudio (Audiophile????????) is poor in comparison, with ASIO driver issues. Next is Terratec but this is robust. The RME and Lunx are good both soundwise and technically (I measure waveform integrity and can do all the other things.)
Absolutely, but not Creative!
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