[dburna]

(cross-posted to Audio Asylum):

Hi,

I am looking to replace my laptop that I use as the "driver" for my FLAC hard drive-based audio system.  I still have a CD player but it gets very little use at this point.  In shopping around, I noticed that several laptop manufacturers actually supply digital audio out (S/PDIF) on several models.  The main machines I have seen that do this are from Acer and Hewlett-Packard (Pavillion).  So my questions are:

1. Is there any laptop that can provide an "optical audio out"?  Are there any other laptops (at or around $1k or less) that provide either S/PDIF or optical audio outs?

2. In theory (a big *IF*, of course), a computer providing S/PDIF out should be better than USB->S/PDIF->DAC, correct?  Right now I'm using a HagUSB to convert the sound from my laptop. Does anyone have any direct experience using the H-P Pavillion S/PDIF outputs that can comment on the jitter and/or sound quality?

3. I like Macs as a concept, but I can't go with them because they don't support FLAC (inexcusable as far as I am concerned -- Apple doesn't seem to have learned from their proprietary/closed architecture mistakes from the '80's and '90's).  I know there are several ways to get a Mac to play a FLAC file.  Has anyone found one that they consider a good solution for a very (very) large song repository? 

4. Semi related question: I also have an Airport Express that has a (mini-) optical audio out.  I know you can't play FLAC files on an Apple system directly, but can you use a laptop to play FLAC files and stream the output to an Airport Express?  I guess the question is this: when a laptop streams audio to an Airport Express, in what format does it do so?  If it converts the audio to WAV before streaming (which Airport Express *DOES* support), perhaps that may help to solve considerably my problem.

As an FYI to inform this discussion, I just received a battery-powered Altmann DAC for my system.  If I can find a good laptop solution that would allow me to use one of the two Altmann inputs (S/PDIF and Optical) for the laptop and one for the output of the CD player, I think I could be done churning equipment for a while.

Thanks in advance for any help/insight you can provide.

-dB (a unit measure of noise)

[Rashiki]

I can provide answers to some of your questions.

1. I see from #2 tht you're not asking about adding a USB or firewire "sound card" with S/PDIF coaxial or toslink output. You should also be able to find a PCMCIA sound card with digital output. For example:
http://www.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=1&subcategory=205&product=10769

2. The sound chips bulit-in to in most laptops and desktop computers are usually fairly low quality since most customers won't care and the manufacturers can cut costs by using the lowest cost part. I doubt that some ten cent sound chip will do a better job than a well-designed USB to S/PDIF interface, but that is just conjecture -- I have never seen any measurements.

3. FLAC is an open source project and there are versions available for MacOS:
http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html
It may be true that iTunes doesn't support FLAC, but you can have a Mac and not use iTunes. I'm probably the only person in the world who hates the iTunes interface, but I really can't stand it for browsing my music collection. I just have my music collection arranged in directories by first-letter/Artist/Album.

4. I don't have an Airport Express, so I don't know. I use a SqueezeBox and SlimServer. They support just about any non-DRM format you can throw at them, either natively in the hardware or through transcoding.

 -Rob