USB DA recommendation needed

Yes, the Apogee, like the M-Audio, has an SPDiF out. I tried using the SPDiF out on the M-Audio, plugging it into a digital input on my Proceed AVP2 and it did not sound good, which is surprising since the Proceed has very good DAC's and usually makes low end gear sound much better. I haven't tried the SPDiF out on the Apogee yet. I've been listening to it non-stop since I got it on Monday. Today, I plugged the balanced XLR outputs into my Levinson mono-blocks and into my Monitor Audio Studio 60's -- sounds great! The G4 and Apogee make a really satisfying front end. Musical as hell, the imaging is really delightful, I find myself glued to it. I am now going to rip my entire 1,000+ CD collection to an external hard drive, uncompressed, and use this for high quality casual listening in the family room. Convenience with very little compromise!

Hey Rsbeck, can you watch DVDs (Dolby Digital or DTS sound) through your Mac and Apogee Mini-DAC?

For DD and DTS, I believe you'll need a different type of sound card. You can connect a Mac G4 powerbook to some types of displays and watch DVD's and you can play the sound through the Apogee DAC in two-channel, but for multi-channel, DD, DTS, etc -- you'll need a different kind of DAC.

I got some emails about the current status....

So I ended up getting a Edirol UA-5. Setup way easier than the m-audio, basically plug and play.... and then I forgot about it :-)

Sounds great to and hasn't given me a crash once in 3+ months.
Works with DVDs etc., you forget that its not the internal sound.

The only negative is that i wish the box would be smaller, so i could hide it better. It has way more features than I need (mic inputs etc..) but maybe they come in handy some day.

i am now thinkign of gettign an airport express and hooking that up via toslink to the edirol :-)

Runner, I was looking at this unit to. You are probably following the other thread as well. The Waveterminal looks smaller, but I should probably see if I can track down some dimensions to verify this. It looks like a high quality unit that doesn't have all the extra features.