Hi All,
Im new to the forums and i have a few questions regarding digital outputs:
I'm wanting to build a music server for the living room and i want to know if there is any difference in quality between the digital coax output on the motherboard vs a pci soundcard, is there any model of board that has a better than usual quality output or do i need to look at a card, if so any suggestions?
To put things in perspective i love my hi-fi and i have a fairly serious setup: Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista Intergrated, EAD DSP7000-mk3 DAC, Chario Hiper 2000 reference speakers, using Nu-Vista interconnects and silver Signal Cable digital cable and speaker cables.
I have gone down the Vinyl route and was very disappointed that most modern music appears to have come from a crummy digital source to begin with so the vinyl doesnt sound any better to me than the CD, of course this isnt the case with alot of older music but it is very constrictave on my music collection.
Getting back on topic, i have alot of MFSL EAC music and want to give a music server the best possible chance, so i figure with all the money spent on the rest of the system it would be silly to ignore the quality of the digital output.
If anybody does have the answer would you also mind explaining why the sound card digital out is better or not as the case may be, its a bit out of my league as i mainly deal with analouge gear.
To my mind a digital out is a digital out, its just sending the ones and zeroes to the dac that does all the real work, so i am very interested to learn what else is going on before it reaches the DAC if anything.
If it makes any difference im using foobar 2000 v0.9.6.8 and windows xp to play my music at the moment, of course it bypasses all the windows sound mixing etc.
