After agonizing over how to make the eight feet from my computer to my Beresford DAC that feeds my Eico HF-81, I originally went with a USB extension cable to a Turtle Beach mini USB Advantage to optical.

I've now replaced that with the spdif connector on the on-board sound card using a coax patch cable with F-RCA adaptors. Sounds a bit better, cleaner using Winamp with the ASIO plugin.

YMMV