I am getting better sound quality in transparency and joy out of my cd's playing them through a CDP in compare to my laptop ,i guess its due the higher end ' dac in the CDP compare to the chip in the laptop ,probably ,all have to do is to get a quality dac to my laptop ,plus quality speakers ' then do i need amp ? and what about the digital signal proceesing adc to dac are they all the same ? what involves the signal to noise ratio quality ? what involves the jitter clocking issues ?
the following just read at another forum ;
S/PDIF is the same whether it's carried over optical or coaxial. The bitstreams are exactly the same, just pulses of light in place of pulses of voltage. It's limited to 24 bit 48khz audio in it's basic form, but I'm pretty sure most game audio is at 48khz anyway so that's not really a limitation.
USB is another way to get a digital signal out of the computer and to a DAC, alot more flexible than S/PDIF, allows bidirectional communication between your computer and the audio device, as well as basically unlimited format support, up to the limits of the audio device itself, but as stated above that may only be 24/48 anyway.
then what all those about ;
fire wire to usb,
halide design bridge ,
headphone jack out
OR5,
MCRU linear power supply.
and are used to enhance the sound quality of the dac ??