Neophyte question about DAC's...

Compared to feeding the sound out of a PC's headphone jack, a USB DAC can be a major improvement. I am quite impressed by the tiny and inexpensive nuforce USB DAC I purchased earlier this year in order to listen to Pandora off a notebook PC thru my patio speaker setup.

Internet Radio is of a very low quality, equivilent to an MP3. I would not suggest investing alot of money into a dac solely for this purpose.

You could also try something like the HRT Streamer II. Music Direct offers these and has a 30 day return policy, so if it doesn't make a difference, not a prob...

I just posted this a bit ago regarding this very question. More of a way to show what you can get out of internet radio, especially Pandora which I use exclusively now. It was recorded on an iPhone but still, you may get the idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-betjXo_kQU

Back in the day people would get a good tuner like McIntosh MR78 (I got poor mans version a Yamaha T-2).But it was as good as you could get back then.

But as Cerrut said regular Internet Radio is compressed/lossy though it great that world is opened up to (I haver some great Jazz from Finaland)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_radio

But you live in right area new HD radio has really good sound could benefit from a good $500-$1K DAC (and maybe goose your CD player).Check these sites

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio and

http://www.hdradio.com/

One hopes that Internet Radio will send less compressed or lossy signal but if it you can find local station you can get a Sony tuner for $75.Still DAC will improve is steamed and bypasses a crappy computer sound card and will help CD.Maybe it's a matter of bandwidth which seems to be limiter for everything these days.It''s to bad because you can get a computer to play WAV or FLAC/AIFF with a DAC which can rival a CD player multiples many times it's price with right DAC (Srajan of 6moons.com thinks his Apple with $3500 Weiss DAC sounds as good as a $20K CD player and told me even an old Apogee DAC with any computer you can get used for $500 and FLAC or AIFF can come damn close).The Internet Radio should catch up.
Chazz