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one silly idea from my side, as i'm soon to start running a fully altmann-ized 12V car battery powered system, would it be too crazy to build a small step down transformer 12/5V so i can feed this thing with a clean battery power too. or any other ideas how this can be implemented?
using a computer/iTunes as a digital front end -- there is just no going back.
After much experience, I honestly feel that wireless ethernet is a much better medium for streaming music. This has been my experience at any rate.
You must have a fairly fast PC w/ lots of resources to play back through USB out to SPDIF. You will get pops, clicks and dropouts even w/ a dedicated and optimized PC.
When you use a USB to SPDIF device you need a player such as Foobar or Winamp. I used Asio4All to avoid the Kmixer in WINXP and Foobar as the player. You must have a fairly fast PC w/ lots of resources to play back through USB out to SPDIF. You will get pops, clicks and dropouts even w/ a dedicated and optimized PC. I am a network engineer by profession, and worked fairly hard to eliminate the noise but Windoze has built in housekeeping tasks that can't be eliminated. I avoided Vista, that might make things easier but I truly doubt it.
Take my advice, I'm not using it.
I guess this is one of those YMMV situations because I had the exact opposite situation. With Slimserver running it uses up around 3x the memory as foobar running through my Trends USB->SPDIF. As for noise I never heard a single click, pop, or other type of noise in the 6 months or so I used the Trends. All I did was turn off all the sounds in the Control Panel. The computer was a bit noisy until I replaced all the fans and added a muffler to the PSU.
I don't think I'm alone in my observations. In a review last year http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/empirical/offramp.htmlif you read down you will see that the reviewer had a similar experience with regard to pops and clicks. I also stand by my comments regarding resource usage in Windoze and that Slimserver has a considerably lower footprint than Foobar. I described my actual experience and cited a similar experience by a reviewer. My observation was that streaming the music over ethernet worked a lot better for me than USB to SPDIF. You can now avoid the SPDIF conversion completely and arrive at the DAC chip in I2S but that requires a different setup entailing increased costs. The target keeps moving, I said earlier. For now I am fairly satisfied but the bulk of my listening is via analog anyway. I've been down the path you are on and simply wanted to share my experience.