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Please help me figure out how to get from point A to point B in PC sourcing!

Posted by solbergg (A) on March 31, 2006 at 20:27:00

Hello all,

I am trying to make my pc an audiophile grade source, but I am quite a bit confused on how to implement it properly. I have done a lot of searches and acquired a lot of information that gives me an idea of what to do, but I am not sure how to tie it all together. So, I will show you where I am at now, and where I would like to be after all is said and done. Here goes:

Point A:

Computer - IBM Thinkpad T41p
Soundcard - Creative Audigy ZS Notebook (ASIO support and optical out)
Amp - Meier Headphone Amp
Output - Sennheiser 580's or Grado HF-1's
Source material - Entire digital library currently in ALAC

Point B:

FLAC w/ Foobar > Audigy 2 ZS Soundcard > DAC > Headphone Amp > Headphones

So, the three major issues I need help with are these:

1) I cannot use ALAC with ASIO, and thus I must rerip and encode my cds into FLAC. My collection isn't too huge, so I am not concerned abou time or storage. What I am concerned is that I am not sure how to do this correctly.

2) Once I have all of my music encoded with FLAC, I need to find out how to utilize ASIO with Foobar and the creative soundcard. I imagine this is an easy step, but I don't have enough experience with Foobar to know such things.

3) I need to figure out what the heck to look for in a dac. There are so many different stats for dacs that just confuse me. Should I go for the highest bit rate dac, or does that actually degrade sound to use a higher bit rate than the original 16 bit from the cds? How is one dac better than another? How can I tell if one is better than the other? What is the sweet spot for spending the most bang/buck on dacs?

I apologize if these questions are asked repetitively in the forum. I tend to get overwhelmed by the new terminology that I am not familiar with. For example, what the heck is jitter? Is a pc that can relay bit perfect digital output superior to its cd counterpart? Any help that can be provided would be greatly appreciated, even if it's a link to information where this has already been covered (assuming a layman like me can understand it). Thanks!

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