Originally Posted by
Gazjam
Back in the day Kevin I ran a SOTM usb card in my music servers,
sounded better than Motherboard USB out straight out the packet.
It REALLY showed what it was cabable of when I sorted out clean power throughout the PC itself,
the biggest hitter being seperating the 3 power rails and powering them independantly from linear PSUs.
The USB card had its own linear as well, so was running 4 to one PC box!
All else being equal, thats where I'd be looking to improve your PCs sound.
USBs not the best transmission method for digital, something to consider?
To get it to work properly you need to do some work on it, I found fitting a SPDIF output connected from SPDIF motherboard header with silver in teflon cable was better than any of the USB tweaks i tried.
Sound was excellent once I got the power sorted though, kinda why (I guess) Im such a stickler for it in my hifi setup, old habits die hard.