Sound Card Recommendations for the iMac

It isn't a matter of wanting to improve on the Mac Core Audio set-up - it has worked wonderfully well for the last 3 years. It is just a matter of trying to correct a sudden degradation in the sound quality over the last two weeks. The problem lies within the Mac itself, not my other equipment, so I am making the assumption that there is a glitch in the basic Core Audio portion of OSX. My thinking was that an external sound card would "go around" the internal Mac and once again restore good quality sound.

Maybe others have had this experience??

Did you upgrade iTunes recently? Have you tried playing music through different players on the iMac? If it is garbled distorted sound it could just be a software issue, I had terrible sound on a Windows XP version of iTunes after upgrading to a newer iTunes version....

I would not think that a bad internal soundcard would affect optical digital out... as the digital signal is just passing through... So make sure you rule out software problems first.

Thank you Arni - Yes, I recently upgraded to iTunes 9 - hadn't thought about that. How did you correct the problem after upgrading to a newer ITunes version? Maybe you are right on the mark.

I ended up reverting back to the previous version (from 7.0 back to 6.5). My wife later got an iPod that was incompatible with 6.5 so I upgraded again, (7.5), and had the same issues all over again. Went to Songbird, which was the only Windows player that could handle apple lossless files at the time.

I have crossed over to the good side now and have an iMac. There as some free alternative players for Macs out there, such as cog, vox,and songbird to name a few free ones. I recommend you download one of these and see (hear) if they sound better than your distorted iTunes.
Good luck,

thanks Arni I'll check into it!! Hope it doesn't destroy all the album artwork!