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USB DA recommendation needed

I have an apple G4 cube that i want to use as jukebox for my stereo. I am looking for an external soundcard that gives me good sound. I am getting a Linn Majik, which has only analogue inputs, so the soundcard should have rca jacks.

I tried the m-audio firewire audiophile, but it crashes the cube all the time, even though it sounds great. I also tries an imic and it sounds horrible, but works flawlessly.... so maybe usb is the way to go.

What other options are out there? not needing drivers is a plus.

thanks!

O.
runner77
runner77 OP
12 posts
 
Thats bad to hear. I thought it was just the audio over firewire or the slowness of my cube (500MHz). But I guess m-audio just has bad drivers.
I actually just got an RMA to send mine back and am looking for a solution that works without drivers.
An additional rpoblem I encountered was that the audiophile seemed to only work with 44.1kHz sources (like itunes). Playign a movie with mplayer which has 48kHz audio would result in silence. I tried to change the sample rate in the control panel.. but guess what... it crashed.

Anyway, now I am looking at the edirol UA-1D or 1X. that would give me spdif and it does not seem to need drivers !

http://www.edirol.com/products/info/ua1d.html (coax+optical)
http://www.edirol.com/products/info/ua1x.html (optical+rca)

So:
- what are your experiences with the sonica ?
-what connection do I need for external "decent" dacs? coax or optical?
-what "decent" dacs can be had in the $300-500 range ?
edesilva
768 posts
 
I seem to recall seeing that there was some known issue with the Mac's audio USB interface. You might want to call M-Audio and see if they have any insight...
runner77 OP
12 posts
 
I actually don't think that it is a Mac core audio problem since my Griffin iMic works just fine in all applications. It just doesn't sound as good.

The m-audio I had was a firewire card. M-audio tech support was trying to be helpful, but besides "reinstall everything" they couldn't come up with much. The kernel logs clearly indicated that the m-audio driver was crashing.
:-(
edesilva
768 posts
 
That is strange, b/c I thought musicians favored the Mac environment, so I figure they would have given more attention to that context. My Sonica hasn't given me any issues on my XP system.

Lots of good DACs in the $300-$500 range--stuff changes so fast that you can pick up state-of-the-art digital gear from a couple years ago for peanuts. I like Theta, and picked up my Pro Basic III for about $500... I used to run it with a Chroma, which also sounded OK, but a bit thin. I'd stay away from the Progeny.
rsbeck
887 posts
 
Don't know what I did, but I tried it again tonight and it is working beautifully.
Wow -- having a DAC outside the computer makes a really nice difference.
Increased dynamics, air, detail, musicality -- the works. Now, if it sounds THIS good with the M-Audio USB Audiophile DAC, I wonder how much better
the Apogee would sound......

I'm sick I tell you.

But seriously, with this kind of device, I'm more convinced than ever that
hard drive is THE solution for music storage. You can rip a huge collection of CD's to a hard drive uncompressed, play them through an external DAC and get CD quality music. This sounds better than my old Yamaha s2300 Universal player, which is a $1,000 player. It would take a pretty serious CD player to beat this set-up. And -- that's with this $175 DAC.

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