Cabling a sound card SPDIF out to a DAC?

[David.WE.Roberts]

X-post

I am probably digging myself a hole as usual.

I want to connect a PC to my stereo and get the best quality possible.

This suggests using a digital output from the PC to an off-board DAC.

A decent off-board DAC takes optical or coaxial digital input, plus USB.

A decent PC sound card had an spdif option where you convert one of the

3.5mm jacks to spdif out.

So given the cable run of between 2m and 3m to the stereo location I thought I would put the DAC with the stereo and run digital about 2.5m of cable to the DAC.

Firstly normal digital coax is RCA RCA but the sound card has a 3.5mm jack plug. So I would need a 3.5mm RCA co-ax cable and they seem to be about as common as rocking horse droppings.

I could use USB - 3 metres seems to be within the spec - yet it seems a shame not to use the built in digital features of the sound card.

I think I have just talked myself into a USB cable.

Another alternative would be to have a pair of 2.5 metre long analogue cables (usual hi-fi interconnect) to go to the DAC and have the DAC by the PC but this seems clunky and expensive.

Any suggestions welcome.

Cheers

Dave R

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Make up a 3.5mm jack to RCA lead? Ordinary audio co-ax will be fine for a shortish run.

Don't suppose it has Toslink? That has the beauty of no ground connection so no possibility of ground loops.

[Michael Chare]

If your PC does not have an S/PDIF port does it by any chance have an S/PDIF header of the motherboard? (as mine does)

[spuorgelgoog]

That's what soldering irons are for.

Or ebay.

However is it coaxial SPDIF or is it optical? If it's optical on the 3.5mm socket then use an optical to TOSLINK adapter such as

together with a TOSLINK cable

Owain

[Rob Morley]

It's a netbook IIRC.

[Mike Barnes]

I've been using an external DAC connected by USB for years, very happy. It's not a long USB cable but I'd have thought 3 metres would be no problem.

My DAC is by the PC but that doesn't seem particularly clunky to me and it (the cable, that is) wasn't expensive. One of the reasons I did it that way was the DAC feeds three rooms in different directions.

[Rob Morley]

Just get a composite video RCA cable (yellow plugs) and solder on the necessary jack plug - is it one of those TRRS ones? Maplin is your friend (although eBay is a lot cheaper if you know what you want and don?t mind waiting a few days).

[therustyone]

I've been doing this for a while with a Roland UA25 and a Maplin DAC, but t wo problems:

1. my Sony Viao Vista laptop has a bug in the USB driver that freezes the computer if I put it in standby then try to wake it up while the USB audio is in use. A not-unknown problem. One work-around is to disable enhanced US B modes in control panel. This has the side effect of disabling any USB pr inters.
2. With Win 8 on my desktop there were big problems and it probably needs the Win 8 multimedia extensions for USB audio to work, not sure about SPDIF . Quite expensive. I downloaded Roland's own Win 8 drivers but they just d idn't work. Finished up scrapping Win 8 and installed a new Win 7 pro which works beautifully. Another Win 8 problem was not being able to access the app store, another common problem.

rusty

[dennis]

If its on the 3.5 mm jack its probably optical. A tos link cable is probably what you want depending on what the DAC has.

If you are using the digital out there probably aren't any digital features worth using.

You want to stay digital for as long as possible.

Can you tell the difference between these?

In a blind test?

[David.WE.Roberts]

Aha - bonus point for remembering previous conversations, and two demerits for not remembering all previous conversations ;-)

The PC in question is a somewhat modified PCSpecialist tower, currently in limbo between Vista 32 and W8.1 x64.

It has sound (including digital) on the MoBo (Realtek) and on the add on sound card (SB Audigy).

Although I also have a Sandy Bridge W7 box which might at some time be linked via a DAC to an audio system.

However I suspect that the S/PDIF header is unlikely to be a co-ax socket so I would have to get a connector from the MoBo to a rear panel to expose the S/PDIF as a co-ax connector.

Interesting thought, but at the moment I am searching for the downside of using USB.

Cheers

Dave R

[Mike Barnes]

Continuing the upward trend in prices there's this...

... which I've used for many years and I have to say it does sound pretty good.

[Rob Morley]

Yes - the Audiolab one smells of ... bullshit. :-) The little blue jobbie doesn't get on with Linux (or at least it didn't when I last tried it - it made nasty screeching noises).

I got one of these for about a tenner on eBay

which sounds fine - I like that it has a real mute switch and volume knob, I don't think I've ever used the "audio enhancing" features.

[tony sayer]

In article , Rob Morley scribeth thus

"Make your MP3s sound better than CDs

MP3s and other digital music are great because they are small and fast to download. But because this music is compressed, your songs sound squashed and lifeless. Xmod intelligently restores the highs and lows for rich, crystal clear music playback".

Humm ... think I'll pass on that one then, perhaps the Audiolab isn't quite so much bull s**te;!...

[dennis]

If its for MP3 audio you may as well use the £4 one.

I have a creative labs USB sound card somewhere that's OK, but I use the digital out into my AV amp these days. Just run HDMI into it and let it sort it out.

[Bill]

In message , therustyone writes

And don't forget this, which can apply if the sample rate in Windows control panel doesn't match what is playing

Anyone know if the bodge has been issued as a proper update to W7 and whether it is still broken in W8.x?

[Michael Chare]

The adapter I bought on ebay has both coax and optical outputs. There was a wee problem with the wiring though. The pin outs on the motherboard are not standardised.

[Adrian C]

The SB Audigy electrical digital output is normally presented at the rear on a 3.5mm mono plug (tip & shield), and the signal is post processed audio i.e. tone & environmental effects included.

Regarding S/PDIF DACs - the best sounding with voices, dry bass percussion and piano (top key stuck hard) I have is a Sony MDS-JB920 Minidisc Deck stuck in Record Monitor mode (see eBay). I have purchased a few USB DAC's - IMO There isn't anything remarkable there on sale for less than £100 and I prefer my Sony S/PDIF setup.

Ah, history. A loooooong time ago, I was one of the first sound card hackers on the web wibbling about getting S/PDIF audio out of a PC, doing things with optical toslink modules and debugging real 44.1KHz C-Media chipsets with aid from their tech guys. That was the days of real noisy analogue oncard audio which really was pitiful in comparison.

[Rob Morley]

Or don't activate the gimmicky "enhancements" and it's a reasonable quality USB sound card.

Of course some people like to think that "audiophile" equipment is special, like they are.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Rob Morley escribió:

The Russ Andrews catalogue must be aimed at very "special" people, then.

[Rob Morley]

Oh yes. ;-)