Wyred4Sound Dac-2 vs Preamp and separate DAC

@ranperry: you really should try the USB async directly into the dac2. Youre missing out on the best sounding part of the unit (IMHO). I tried exacty what you have and found the m audio spdif nowhere near as good sounding as sending the usb direct to the dac2 using kernel streaming with jriver mc.

I can't. Wyred4Sound does not provide their proprietary drivers for Linux. Also, I prefer using Linux as I get Bit Perfect sound, bypassing the OSs mixer altogether. USB audio is not mature yet (this is from a hardware engineer perspective). Once DAC manufactures will start using the standard audio protocol in USB 2 and USB 3 I may give it a try. The problem is that Microsoft does not have native hi res support and Apple's own implementation is lacking. Maybe in a few years....

Jriver's implementation of kernel streaming bypasses the os's sound mixer alltogether. Its a relatively new feature that's come out in the last few months. Id say its better than anything else in windows. But i also agree with you that Linux rules. Id be curious how the latest implementation of windows kernel streaming in jriver compares with what youre using. What application do you use for playback?

I am using MPD on the server and GMPC (ubuntu desktop) and MPDroid (Motorola Xoom) to control my music. Can you control the volume within Jriver? How can you tell that it bypasses the mixer?

This is from Jriver's site about Kernel Streaming: Kernel Streaming is a hardware direct way to speak directly to a WDM audio driver. Jriver Media Center 15.0.6 (and later) adds support for Kernel Streaming output. Kernel Streaming is a hardware direct, bit-perfect method of communicating with an audio device. It bypasses any Windows mixing. It holds the card exclusively so other programs can not play music over the top or change the sample rate.

Also, you can't control the volume (at least within Windows), it's a fixed level output direct to your W4S DAC2 that goes over async USB. Within the configuration of JRiver, you can select the output device and type and the DAC2 is a "device" that you can select. It's pretty cool. I've used a lot of other playback programs, but this one sounds the best on Windows at least (works fine on Windows 7 32 and even 64 bit without any issues). It's also how you'll be able to play back high rez audio like 24 bit 192Khz Flac.

For playback, I use an Ipad with Plugplayer to control Jriver as a media render and "server" even though it's really playing the flac files locally. I'd say Plugplayer still has a few bugs to work out, but it's definitely very usable.

It would be really nice if Sonos would just get the hint and come up with an audiophile version of a Zoneplayer 90 or something like that.