[eclein]

I'm a newbie to this hobby so bear with. I have most of my music on a VAIO laptop (itunes) and listen via the headphone output to either Event TR5 bi-amped nearfield monitors or into my AV receiver and through my HT setup. If I get like a- Musiland 01 US external soundcard- and plug it into my laptops USB port I can output a signal to either setup and its considered a DAC correct?? Am I being redundant by adding this piece or gaining a new dimension in my signal? Will I hear a difference? I need to be cheap but want to be cheerful when I hook it up.
 

[mcgsxr]

I would agree that with what you are proposing, you will use the external soundcard as a DAC.

How much better it will sound, will depend on how good (or not) the existing soundcard is in your PC.

I would also suggest that higher quality source material (lossless vs mp3 etc) will yield a more audible improvement.

[eclein]

Mark..thanks for your input. When I was even newer to this whole thing I just imported my CD's into itunes in whatever format is the default. I have recently converted my library to .flac files hoping that I could notice a difference in quality....is that lossless? If not what file format is? I'd re-import the CD's but no longer have them, so I guess I'm looking for any way to convert what I have to a better format or throw hardware in the mix to obtain better sound.

[JimJ]

You have to make sure you convert to FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) directly from the uncompressed source material - once you convert to MP3, you've lost the quality and it doesn't matter if you then convert to a lossless format, you aren't getting the lost data back. It's called "transcoding", and becomes a problem if you get music online from untrustworthy sources.

For ripping from CD, I really like Exact Audio Copy.

[eclein]

Thanks....