Neophyte question about DAC's...

Internet Radio is of a very low quality, equivilent to an MP3. I would not suggest investing alot of money into a dac solely for this purpose.

You could also try something like the HRT Streamer II. Music Direct offers these and has a 30 day return policy, so if it doesn't make a difference, not a prob...

I just posted this a bit ago regarding this very question. More of a way to show what you can get out of internet radio, especially Pandora which I use exclusively now. It was recorded on an iPhone but still, you may get the idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-betjXo_kQU

Back in the day people would get a good tuner like McIntosh MR78 (I got poor mans version a Yamaha T-2).But it was as good as you could get back then.

But as Cerrut said regular Internet Radio is compressed/lossy though it great that world is opened up to (I haver some great Jazz from Finaland)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_radio

But you live in right area new HD radio has really good sound could benefit from a good $500-$1K DAC (and maybe goose your CD player).Check these sites

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio and

http://www.hdradio.com/

One hopes that Internet Radio will send less compressed or lossy signal but if it you can find local station you can get a Sony tuner for $75.Still DAC will improve is steamed and bypasses a crappy computer sound card and will help CD.Maybe it's a matter of bandwidth which seems to be limiter for everything these days.It''s to bad because you can get a computer to play WAV or FLAC/AIFF with a DAC which can rival a CD player multiples many times it's price with right DAC (Srajan of 6moons.com thinks his Apple with $3500 Weiss DAC sounds as good as a $20K CD player and told me even an old Apogee DAC with any computer you can get used for $500 and FLAC or AIFF can come damn close).The Internet Radio should catch up.
Chazz

HD radio sounds much worse than internet stations at 128.

Most of it available here at least is not that great, you can clearly hear the artifacts. Any decent analog tuner sounds much better to me.

HD does not stand for high definition, leave it to the marketing people.

From the crutchfield site first thing that popped up in google:

"Originally, the initials stood for "hybrid-digital," because the digital signals were carried with the analog wave.

According to iBiquity Digital Corporation, that's been changed, and the letters "HD" now don't stand for anything.

Some articles and news stories have erroneously assumed that "HD" stands for "high definition," which has contributed to the confusion between HD Radio technology and high-definition TV."