gilesyboy

Sorry tried to edit but was too late, wanted to add: Was this external converter not primarily developed for people with laptops who did not have these various outputs, is there still benefit to be had by people with dedicated onboard cards when using these external converters. Is there a fundamental improvement to sound quality when using USB output compared with optical?

Do you think there is a further benefit to having this in a separate box rather than in the DAC or is this just potentially because as in my case I could not afford the USB input.

Hello there I have been messing around with computers for a good stretch of time and am constantly trying to squeeze a higher quality of sound out of my PC. What I need to find is the best possible sound card to deliver an optical feed to my Benchmark DAC 1. I do not need any bells and whistles and am just looking for a card that produces as little jitter as possible to try and keep things as clean as I can. I am due to put together a dedicated PC music server when I have enough spare cash hanging around and plan to go the old fanless, SSD, linear power supply route and try to tick as many boxes as possible to reduce background noise and jitter. In this case do you think a separate sound card will show vast improvements over the onboard optical out seeing as I am not looking for any encoding of any description and just want the best unfettered signal transport solution.