USB Dac

With a USB cable from your computer to your DAC. Is this a trick question?
:scratch2:
 
You may have to fiddle with your Sound devices to tell the laptop to send the audio out to the dac.
 
What's the laptop? Anything less than 2-5 years old should be pretty much plug 'n play. Most DACs will load into Windows native without having to use drivers. Then just select the DAC as your default device (via control panel, sound in Windows), make sure your media player is pointing to that, and you should be good to go.

Older laptops ... best o' luck. Audio support on those can be truly flaky.

PS ... DO remember to turn off system sounds when using an external DAC. That can be right annoying to have the OS serve up a TADA!! when you're cranking it ... don't ask me how I know ...
 
How does one connect a USB Dac to a laptop computer?

Might help to give us a some insight into the nature of your question. Do you have a USB DAC that you're trying to connect? Or is this a general question about how DAC's interface with PC's, and how to output music from a laptop to a stereo system?
 
Yes to whell's second question. I'm thinking about buying a USB Dac/Headphone amplifier. Is it simply a matter of any usb out from the computer to usb in on the dac? The computer is a 10 year old Gateway M-250E.
 
One plus is that your laptop is current enough to have USB 2.0 ports. Any of those should work ... theoretically. I wouldn't try running any more than one USB device at a time due to limited resources.

I'd think the biggest obstacle would be the CPU and audio chipset. Those are going to have to work REAL hard just to output redbook CD to the DAC, and I think you can forget about any hi-res media.

Realistically, I think you could do better with even an entry level new computer. Depending on what you're actually trying to do, that may even eliminate the need for a DAC as onboard sound processing has made major advances in the last 10 years.
 
Here are the specs on that laptop:

http://www.pcworld.com/product/26484/gateway-m250e.html

You will be limited with what you can accomplish, but you should be able to playback music files from your hard drive. There may be some tweaks you can apply to get good quality playback:

- install Foobar 2000 as your playback software. Its free, its very customizable, and it supports direct output to your DAC (with the tweak described below).

- assuming that you still have Win XP on that laptop, you can install a program called "ASIO4All". This will help you bypass the Win XP mixer stack and output directly to your DAC. You'll need to go into Foobar's preferences menu and tell Foobar to output your music to ASIO4All. You'll also need to set up ASIO4All to output your DAC.

- Play music back directly from your hard drive at first, as opposed to (for example) an external USB drive. While your PC has 3 USB ports, you may find that your older PC struggles a bit supporting streaming to a USB DAC and accessing files from a USB drive at the same time. If you have a network attached drive, you might try streaming from your music from your network. Your computer has a wireless G receiver, which should be fine for streaming at least 16/44 content.

- If you're adventurous, you might try a version of Linux on that laptop. There are versions of Linux made specifically for older PC's that might help you get more out of that laptop. You could try the following version of Linux which is good for "beginners":

Linux Mint with the XFCE desktop: http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=169

If you're comfortable navigating Linux, you might try something like Vortexbox. Let us know how it works out.
 
That's a good thing ... W7 has WASAPI, which is a great leap ahead of Direct Sound for internal sound handling. You shouldn't need any external drivers at all - I'd see how that works first before trying to load any drivers supplied with a DAC. One less hoop for the digital signal to have to jump through on it's path.
 
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