[W9TR]

Originally Posted by SteveJ

Thanks for the reply Peter.

I don't think the Dragonfly would get me where I am trying to go. It would be running on PC power a subject to that inherent noise and grounding, or rather lack thereof.

The Shiit products, like the Bifrost or Gungnir, look quite interesting and would not suffer from those impediments and would solve part of the equation, the conversion of the audio file from digital to analog, but there is still the matter of the files arriving at my home over my internet connection and passing through my computer where the digital file would be extracted and passed on to the DAC through USB.

How do I get the music file from the modem to the DAC without passing it through the PC?

W9TR, how do you get the music files from the modem to the Yggdrasil?

Apart from a dedicated piece of streaming hardware, you can use an Audio Renderer like the microrendu to get audio out of your pc and into a dac without connecting your audio system directly to your PC.

I use the SurfacePro3 as my music server. It is a laptop/tablet combo device. It drives The Yggdrasil in my main system and the Topping D50 in the system at our lake home. For critical listening I run it on its internal battery.

The Schiit DAC’s are all very good. I love my Yggdrasil but at $2400 it is not inexpensive.

At this point I would try an external DAC with your existing PC. Get a decent USB cable and if you want there are a number of external devices you can add that isolate the DAC USB input from the PC to reduce noise. Some DAC’s like the Yggdrasil already have isolated usb inputs, which is a big plus.

Tom