USB SQ, what can one expect

Cerrot - I'm assuming the spdif output you are using is on a seperate sound card - which one are you using?

What others have you tried?

Thanks

As with each audio type component, USB can be expected to be: poor-to-good-to-absolute-state-of-the-art depending upon the component designer's: expertise, capabilities, priorities, and voicing. Anything more specific is a generalization that doesn't befit many of the knowledgeable posters in this forum who through many decades of trial and error, fully recognize that there is absolutely no component type, nor one way to achieve the goal of very highly resolved audio playback!

There are far too many combinations and permutations and hence variables, to make anything but closed minded, belief/faith driven sweeping statements about equipment types as a whole and their overall negative or positive merits etc.....

I've been surprised, blind-sided, and simply blown away by far too many equipment types to be simplistically misguided by previously held theorems! Keep an open mind as much as you can....the rewards are always worth the effort! In fact, you might learn something new and find something that's better than you could have ever imagined or believed!

+1 Mrmb

USB can sound as good as vinyl:
http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?ddgtl&1398132150&openflup&1775&4#1775

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=95464
.msg960567#msg960567

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Willie, I have been using the ESI Juli@ for a while now. I have had a few; off the mobo (Intel, forget the chipset); I've tried RME, Universal Audio, Maudio, the usual asus and creative nonsense, pretty much all I could get my hands on. Firewire was much better than USB but I have found the ESI Juii@ ($150!) is the best for my ears/system - and ironically - the cheapest.