DACs: Airport Express vs waveterminal vs mini-dac

I am in the process of setting up a database with Foobar and output from the PC to a Music Fidelity TriVista 21 DAC. I am feeding this to the Bryston Bp25 PreAmp and 4 7BST monoblocks to my Kappa 9's or RS1 B's. From the PC I also send a signal to the Electrhome 8500 CRT procector for 2 channel home theater. The sound is excellent as compared to using the analog signal from the onboard sound card. The TriVista DAC has had excellent reviews from many sources and am quite pleased so far. I've also tried this with my DVD player for the transport and the results were about the same.

I am wondering if the music might be better if I use a quality sound card?? Right now the output is from the Realtek 850 chipset with the latest drivers available to the DAC.

Any responses are appreciated.

I assume the TriVista handles jitter reasonably well. That leaves the question whether you are getting bit-perfect output from motherboard. Are you?

There are many external USB to S/PDIF converters, stock or mod, that can do a good job feeding your TriVista from PC.

Kenn39: I am aware of the Waveterminal as a device than can take USB out of the computer and convert it into S/PDIF or coaxial. What others are there and are some better than others?

Pardales: I was referring to the various stock models from M-Audio and Edirol, and mod versions from Empirical and Redwine. Many have been mentioned earlier in this thread.

I have not tried any other than the stock M-Audio Transit. Pairing with a Benchmark DAC1, I was overjoyed when using Secret Rabbit Code upsampler with Foobar2000. I think Waveterminal does not have the option to output 24/96.

Reading the marketing info on the mods, I think they have the potential to be better. I may look into them seriously in the future. At this point, I am just enjoying music.

Racerxnet - forget the sound card. Use an external converter with it's own power supply, or a USB DAC.