Picking an amplifier

I have used JRiver for several years now and I love it.  It is highly configurable.  If you have a weird driver/pc/audio situation, odds are that JRiver can be configured to work with it.  It supports kernel streaming modes (which may or may not work for you).  I currently use Kernal streaming to the Asus Xonar Digital coax output and it sounds better than other modes.  These modes will bypass the Windows DirectSound driver layer (which is bad and it forces all audio to one sampling rate output).

It also supports playing audio through asio4all driver, which I needed to do when I was outputting to USB.  I'm sure you can do other configurations.  The DSP stack is awesome, if you need it. 

I have heard that JPlay is also has great performance, but since I started with JRiver, I never looked at other software.

I wonder where you will end up with all this. lol.

That’s an interesting find. It’s hard to know for sure from the description if those RCA sockets are COAX SPDIF or if the card only supports toslink. You are paying for 7 analog channels, however. I think the Xonar Essence will still be better, but it’s your budget.

You could also look at this (I found this earlier this year when I was looking at alternate SPDIF interfaces -- there aren’t many):

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Musiland-digital-times-Sound-Card-PCI-S-PDIF-optical-Computer-PC-Internal-/272176487072?hash=item3f5efb9aa0:g:T2cAAOSwT6pVrVRu

I suspect it would perform better than the SEDNA card, but once again is the question of driver support in your O/S.  Personally, I would still pick the Asus even though it is much more expensive.

Just googling around.  Not sure if you found this, but the Musiland digital times does indeed have a Windows 10 driver:

http://emotivalounge.proboards.com/thread/50430/musiland-digital-times-transport-review

I may have to try this card out sometime.

....further investigation on google translate shows that it's only engineered for up to Windows 8:

http://www.musiland.cn/index.php/Download/show/id/75

Jasmine / Digital Age Driver [1.0.7.0] 

 Resource Category: Driver Download

Finishing date: 2012-10-25 

File size: 14848Kb 

Operating environment: Windows XP, WinVista 32-bit, WinVista 64-bit, Windows 7 32-bit, Windows 7 64-bit, Windows 8 32-bit, Windows 8 64-

Okay further analysis. The Musiland has TRS85812NL on the RCA and BNC outputs. These are transformers for digital audio data transmission (which is the proper way to output SPDIF):

http://www.microchip.ua/trxcom/telecom/np97-100.pdf

It does not appear that the Xonar Essence or SEDNA cards have output transformers.

It does have a 24.576 crystal clock. Looks like good power supply filter support. Though, if those are through-hole capacitors, I would be pulling those out and replacing with some nice 220uf polymer caps (along with some .1uf MKPs soldered on the back side for high-frequency stabilization).

No extra DSP or analog stages. Just a non-nonsense well engineered SPDIF card (based on pictures). It also has a real BNC output (which performs better than RCA for spdif). Technically speaking, this is an excellent option and could very well be better than Xonar Essence. The proof is how well the software drivers actually work and real world listening tests. :) At $60, I may pull the trigger on one of these.

Ebay item has extended handling times, but it looks like it is in stock at Shenzhenaudio for $9 more:

https://www.shenzhenaudio.com/musiland-digital-times-24bit-192khz-pci-sound-card-spdif-toslink-bnc.html

Maybe worth trying?