USB DA recommendation needed

After reading up on the Apogee Mini-Dac, I am all but sold. It is expensive, but it sounds like the real deal for turning one's computer into a digital transport with a digital output via USB and converting the digital into high quality analogue. If the M-Audio USB Audiophile isn't all it is cracked up to be, the Apogee will be my next stop.

You can get the Apogee Mini-Dac for around $1,000, get the Mackie HR824's used for around $1,000, use your existing computer for a transport and have a great stounding system for less than the $2,500 you were going to spend.

The Apogee is extremely Mac Compatible. You don't even need to install a driver. I've read that the Mac will recognize the Apogee upon installation and away you go.

Thanks for the responses!

To clarify....
I have th firewire version of the audiophile and I am getting a lot of kernel panics. From the crash logs its pretty clear that its due to the m-audio drivers. I reinstalled the OS (10.3.2 and 10.3.3) and no change. I have nothing else installed.

Do you need drivers to use the USB version??

In addition, while it works with iTunes it doesnt work with some other apps (such as mplayer for watching movies).

Also, it often doen not work after sleep (and give kernel panics then...).
So its definetly not a card you can forget about.... maybe the drivers improve, but maybe not..

The apogee sounds great, but is a bit out of my range. i was looking at the <$300. My system is not that high end... :-)

I kind of like the idea of going 2 step (tos-links/spdif -> DAC) maybe if I can find a theta or another dac reasonably cheap.....

How do the stereolink and the sonica sound compared to the theta ? I guess I could live with the sonica for now until a "deal" on a theta pops up.

Anybody have any listening experience with the ESI waveterminal:
http://www.esi-pro.com/viewProduct.php?pid=10&page=1
or the Edirols ?

thanks!

To my ears, the combination of the Theta and the MAudio Sonica sounds better than the Stereolink. My setup is actually sounding a bit worse right now, b/c I just moved the stereo across the office, and with some other changes, now have PC -> MAudio Sonica USB to toslink converter -> 36' of toslink -> MAudio C02 toslink to digital coax converter -> Theta. I just posted a Q in another thread--I'm looking for insights into whether I'd be better off with 36' of USB or some other device that is USB->coax digital and a long coax digital run...

My M-Audio USB Audiophile came with a driver that had to be installed before the computer would recognize it.

The squeezebox from slimdevices.com is worth a look. It doesn't have a USB input port but it does have both Ethernet and WLAN interfaces, which will allow for remote connectivity to your server-based jukebox. It can play a wide variety of digital formats including uncompressed PCM. The S/PDIF output will allow you to bypass the builtin DAC, and use one of your choice.

I don't have personal experience with this device. However, I'd guess that RFI and jitter might be the two main issues.