[Closed] Play music on PC through the stereo - ways & means

I'm sure the compression on my MP3s will be the limiting factor.

I'd want to clarify how much was down to this before I decided how much i was willing to pay to solve the problem.

Maybe try making an uncompressed version of one of your favourite tracks (and a cd played back through the laptop to be thorough) and comparing it with the .mp3 when played back through the laptop as it stands. If the uncompressed version(s) sound hunky dory and the .mp3 version sounds the way it always has then I wouldn't bother spending anything extra but I would re-encode your music to a better quality format*. If they all sound crappy then I guess it's time for some external sound card/dac type of affair.

*This is assuming you have the option to re-encode and don't possess your music solely as mp3's.

Most of the music on the PC is downloads etc and very few of my CDs are in the library, so yes, unless I want to re-buy hi-res from iTunes I'm stuck with what I've got. But I want to use Spotify and other streaming as well.

I know the playback quality is poor. If I play a CD through the laptop it's not as good as the CD played on the Denon.

I really want to know if the Maplins £35 jobby is OK or crap, I guess. At the moment I'm assuming it's crap, that's what stopped me buying it today when I had it in my mitts.

Do you have a line out on the laptop as well as a headphone jack? Use that.

Are you plugging into the phono sockets on the amp labelled "phono"? Don't do that.

a) No. Just headphone and USB
b) I'm not that stupid. That's where the gramophone plugs in.

You only need one CD to check:

rip it at different qualities, see how lossless compares to 128 through the PC, see how lossless/CD played through the PC sounds compared to CD played on the CD player on the stereo.

Presumably you can burn a CD with track 1 as 128kbps, 2 at 198, track 3 at 320, then play that on the stereo and compare those the files played on the CD?

Sounds like you've done some of that already. No idea how much you should spend when you've worked it all out, though.

What I'd like to know is why some tracks at 128 sound OK and some sound terrible - really messed up (fluttery?) in the top registers - cyblas, sybylants in the vocals etc.

Back to my question then.
Does a £35 USB dac sound any good? I'm going to get something I just want to know whic one.

If it's wireless you want, Belkin do a little bluetooth dongle that plugs into your hifi ext input and allows you to play music over bluetooth.

As for quality - your laptop should be basically fine, but if you are looking for audiophile stuff you'll have to spent a lot. Having done the same thing on my nice hifi many times though, I'd be surprised if it's actually that poor quality. Have you set the levels correctly? Any other settings to check?

All my music is played from Spotify out of my iMac into a Marantz stereo with MS speakers. Can't fault it - as far as I'm concerned it sounds great.

NB Spotify Premium is 320 kbps Ogg Vorbis format.

Do you have any kind of gaming system connected to your stereo?

I stream stuff via TVersity to the PS3 and thus to the stereo. Works with umpteen different things, including Wii, XBox, smartphone, etc. It helps with MP3 encoding too. MP3s played direct from USB stick in the PS3 sound gash, stream them through TVersity and they sound a lot less gash.

If that's not an option, I'd be tempted by the rPAC thing. Sonos is good (my mum has one) but you're paying for a music system in itself, as well as the streaming capability, and I'm not convinced an all-in-one box can do it quite as well as HiFi separates. Also, have a look at this: [url= http://www.amazon.co.uk/Logitech-930-000089-Squeezebox-Touch/dp/B002N203SW/ref=pd_sim_sbs_nm_1/279-1379251-9594738 ]Logitech Squeezebox[/url]

if they still do one I would suggest a Creative external soundcard.

Or if you have an old PC lying around you could set up XBMC on it and control it from your laptop.

Good suggestions. Just need to find what xbmc is and I'll be laughing

XBMC is a free media centre program that can be controlled in pretty much any way - directly, remote from other PC, remote from phone, simple remote control - etc etc

You don't need a particularly fast PC to run it - especially if you just want music.

this is what it can look like with a screen:

Really easy to set up.

I had similar problem a couple of years ago. My solution was a music fidelity v-dac with an apple airport express. Stream spotify over wifi to the airport and then from the airport optically into the v-dac and then into amp (an old audilolab A8000). I went with wifi as running a USB cable across the room from pc to amp was a non starter. USB over more than. 3m is not a good idea. For the money it sounds very nice similar to my old arcam cd player. u need a wee bit of software called airfoil to capture the stream.

I also use an iPod touch and a dock from richer sounds. Airfoil have an app the let's the iPod accept the stream from the airfoil app on the pc. The dock is about £20 and the dac on the iPod sounds ok through a Denon pma250 (another old one) into a wee set of wharfdale diamonds.

I've used the top end and the bottom end of the DA conversion boxes, and most in-between.

At the very bottom end is your bog standard onboard soundcard - usually crap. You can only go up from here.

For not much, as others have suggested, the Creative external USB soundcards are okay for the money. Just taking the DAC out of the interference-rich environment of the motherboard makes a big difference.

Personally I think the best value to sound quality is something like a Turtle Beach USB dongle. You can spend more - for example the Native Instruments ones are especially good - but you get declining benefits as you go up the price scale.

Bear in mind there is only so much quality to be had from an MP3, and spend your money accordingly. Try to avoid Bluetooth if you can, as it will always sound inferior to cable, even using APT-X codecs.

Hope that helps 🙂

What I'd like to know is why some tracks at 128 sound OK and some sound terrible - really messed up (fluttery?) in the top registers - cyblas, sybylants in the vocals etc.

If you want a REALLY geeky answer, email me and I'll send you a bit of coursework I wrote last year on digital compression and how it affects what we can actually hear (and got an A for no less). Otherwise here's the quick and dirty...

MP3's use compression algorithms to make music files physically smaller in size (that bit you already know). They do this by getting rid of the "least important" parts of the information within a recording. And depending on what settings you use to compress to MP3 (Bit rate, sample rate, mono or stereo etc.) depends on what data is lost and how it will affect the sound...

On the face of it, MP3's are very clever, as for the average person they allow lots of music, to be stored very readily in easy to access devices, whilst taking up a whole lot less space than uncompressed files would. An MP3 compressed at the highest quality possible (320KBPS constant bit rate, 44.1KHZ, Stereo) still loses about 78% of the original file's data (leaving a file approximately 22% of the size of the original) but leaving for the most part, all the important bits to you and me. In fact, for most people, on most audio systems, you can't tell the difference between an uncompressed WAV and a 320KBPS MP3 file. You certainly need a better quality sound system than your average car has fitted, or laptop speakers or ipod earphones reproduce.

But listen to a good reference system, and you will hear that there is a loss of bass depth, and less stereo imaging goes on with a 320KBPS MP3. A very little price to pay for most people, but once that data is gone, it's gone.

So most people think "well, 320KBPS is fine, and the file is still quite big, what about if I go down to 192, or 128?"... Hence losing more data...

Well a 128KBPS compressed file you'll still struggle to tell the difference over your laptop speakers, or on the average car stereo, but on anything better it will sound like a fairly poor quality reproduction of the original. Lots of data now having been lost.

Go lower, 96, 64, 48 or even 32KBPS, and the sound quality becomes to be a bit of a joke!

Who decides what data is removed and how do they apply it? Good Question! The "MP3" tag is owned by the Moving Picture Experts Group, so I guess people who work there decided on it. How do they apply it though?

Well, as a Human being, we can typically (on a good day) hear everything in the range from about as low as 20Hz right up to 20KHz. I say on a good day though, cos that implies several things. We are still quite young (our hearing deteriorates with age), the equipment we are using is up to the job of accurate reproduction, the environment is conducive to being totally flat tonally and some other aspects which will be too boring to go into detail about. But suffice to say, our environment is NEVER perfect.

Firstly, most systems most people listen to their music on can't reproduce anything below about 50Hz (sometimes 80 even) so they'll just throw the bass away, or just limit it massively. The same is true up at the 15KHz+ range of the frequency, so that data will just disappear all too often. Then they pick out key ranges in the spectrum that are left. People hear certain frequencies better than others, so often the ones we can't hear as well are just deleted, or turned down. Then there's sometimes frequency clashes where you've got one or more frequency playing at the same time, an MP3 algorithm will just choose the dominant one to stay put and ditch the others. It's all quite complicated, but at the same time very clever and can be quite useful.

In answer to the question though, some music will naturally lend itself better to being compressed than others, simply because of the data that is going to be chosen to be omitted...

Moral of the story is though to NEVER buy your music as MP3's if you give a stuff about sound quality. I still buy everything on CD. I'll happily then rip them all at 320KBPS for playback on my iPhone, in the car, on the laptop etc. But I still have the CD's for playback on proper Audio Systems if and when required.

But to answer the OP's original question. Anything will be better than you have now, but I wouldn't go and spend a massive amount on an Audiophile DAC. I'd look to pick up something like an external USB powered Soundcard from the likes of Tascam 2nd hand on ebay for under £100. It'll be plenty good enough for anything you may want to use it for, and more besides, but will also retain its value when you decide to upgrade. I use a Tascam US-144, great bit of kit, also allows me to hook it up to record things directly to the computer too should I need to.

But listen to a good reference system, and you will hear that there is a loss of bass depth, and less stereo imaging goes on with a 320KBPS MP3. A very little price to pay for most people, but once that data is gone, it's gone.

I bet money you wouldn't be able to tell the difference in a double blind test. 😉

Moral of the story is though to NEVER buy your music as MP3's if you give a stuff about sound quality.

Massive generalisation there.

But listen to a good reference system, and you will hear that there is a loss of bass depth, and less stereo imaging goes on with a 320KBPS MP3

When you say reference system, do you mean decent studio monitors in a properly acoustically treated room, or some expensive hifi speakers powered by pure voodoo, shoved up against a wall in someone's square box front room? 🙂

To the OP - something like this will probably make a decent difference. Though it is made by Behringer so might just randomly stop working in 2 months (or be fine for years).

http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/UCA202.aspx

I bet money you wouldn't be able to tell the difference in a double blind test.

Been there, done it, and yes I can very definitely tell the difference. On good quality studio monitors, in a room designed for listening in though. I'm all kinds of geeky about Audio Quality though (I'd use 96 or even 192KHz sample rate if practical, and always produce at 24 bit rather than 16 before dithering the final production down to 16 bit for use on commercial audio equipment).

But for most people, most of the time, even on pretty good kit, it's difficult to tell I'll grant you that... But beware the geek in the crowd like me! 😉

Massive generalisation there.

Not really. Most music is mastered to sound good as an MP3 these days so isn't losing so much perceived quality to the average punter, but if you're really into High Fidelity audio reproduction, you won't be buying overly compressed tat even on a CD, let alone as an MP3 file.

Have a watch if you're not familar...

To the OP - something like this will probably make a decent difference. Though it is made by Behringer so might just randomly stop working in 2 months (or be fine for years).

Looks good on paper (like everything Behringer). My money would be on quick deterioration of performance over 3 or 4 months before being rendered useless entirely within 6 though... And to think they're a German company!!! 😕

I'd love to take part in that test if you want to set it up.

Been there, done it, and yes I can very definitely tell the difference.

Proper double blind test? Really?

Not really.

Yes really. I give a stuff about sound quality and I'm perfectly happy with 320kbps MP3s (or even VBR MP3s with smaller file sizes/lower average bit rates). I also used to DJ in clubs quite a bit and 320s sounded fine through nice big PA systems too.

Yeah I wouldn't really recommend Behringer as a long term option but as something cheap to see if it makes a difference then maybe......

Laptop got an ExpressCard slot? Or PCMCIA slot if older?
(if pcmcia I have a audigy soundcard i'm selling cheap - email in profile)
They usually have 3.5mm/digital out, does your amp have digital in?

And if you're downloading pirate music...download FLAC 🙂

I also used to DJ in clubs quite a bit and 320s sounded fine through nice big PA systems too.

People make the mistake all too often that a big club PA system is actually creating a high quality reproduction of the source material being played on it.

It's not!

I've DJed in many clubs over the years, and unless it's an exceptionally good system in a club designed to be acoustically pretty much perfect, you'll barely tell the difference between a 320 MP3 and a WAV. I'll agree with you entirely there.

The "I used to DJ, I know about sound quality" argument is all too often rolled out though, and 9 times out of 10 they'll barely be able to appreciate proper sound quality any better than your average Joe. I'm not saying that's you per se, just the amount of times I've heard it would make you wince too!

Sound quality is a law of diminishing returns, I'm not denying that, but if you're at all an audiophile (or pretending to be) and can't tell the difference between a 320 MP3 and a WAV for the same recording, on a decent reference monitor setup, then I'm sorry you won't cut the mustard! But that's probably why I'm hoping for a career in the music production industry...

Anyway back to the OP's request for suggestions on how other people run their systems. The comments attached to this webpage might be useful for inspiration.

[url= http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/09/how-do-you-share-music-between-devices-at-home/ ]http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/09/how-do-you-share-music-between-devices-at-home/[/url]

Some really useful stuff here. Thanks to all who contributed. I'm off to Maplin to buy the unbranded £35 USB DAC that seems to have a few reasonable reviews on Amazon & Maplin.

I know I'm only getting what I pay for but if I want to sit and luxuriate in the sound the music makes I'll always be able to dust off some vinyl, or go and listen to some live music.

In the meantime, my Spotify, Radio 6 Music (what would we do without a souly funky show on Saturday evening, while cooking the dinner?) and collection of downloads on shuffle will sound £35 better.

Yup, an external DAC will make your mp3s sound better. If you get one with non-USB digital in (s/p dif optical & coax) as well as USB, it will be more versatile for things like plugging a new TV into it. I've got an external USB DAC (Musiland) and have had to get another one with an optical input for the TV / Bluray.
Make sure you keep a copy of the drivers in a safe place, and avoid the DAC if it's windows specific in case you go Apple / UNIX in the future (unless you fancy learning how to write NIX drivers...)

My TV sits under the speakers, and on top of the amp so I might try plugging that in to see how it sounds too then.

I once saw Nuclear Assault at the Hummingbird. Since that gig my hearing has been like eh, what?

but if you are looking for audiophile stuff you'll have to spent a lot.

Not really. S/h beresford dac and an airport express. £120
I doubt it's the same for pc's but my macbookpro outputs optical digital data from the audio out or streams to the airport in the digital domain, the dac is bypassed in the airport express so the beresford dac gets digital data (otherwise I would use the dac in the computer or airport which is inferior)
Now I have an iPad I can leave the laptop near the dac and amp and use a cable. Haven't set it up yet but I should be able to control iTunes through my phone or iPad.

If I was looking to buy stuff again I would get a Dac with USB.

I'm tempted by an external DAC but purely for reasons of latency for music recording, as the one in my laptop is terrible.

BTW I have CDs burned from 320kbps constant rate MP3s and they sound like crap on my stereo.

My twopenn'th:

Chi chi hifi wireless stuff (aux in on the hi fi, usb on the pc) from Audio Engine or Audio pro. They also build stuff into speakers so you can have one transmitter for the computer and then broadcast to your hifi and a set (or more than one set) of active speakers elsewhere. Something like £140 for the initial pair of bits for it.

Logitech do a bluetooth box (like the Belkin I think) that attaches to your aux in and you broadcast from your pc via a dongle. That's £26 on Amazon.

If I had the money I'd go with the first option for the quality and the expandability, but I don't so I'm going to get the Logitech thing sometime soon.

Buuut, having read mboy and grum's mini-fight and other comments, I know that I generally can't hear the difference between hifi and regular in the situations I listen in (and probably due to my brain and ears...).

I find all the technical jargon very bewildering, but I do know that if I rip a CD from some MP3 files, it sounds a lot better when played through my stereo, than the MP3 files via a PC or MP3 player. Night and day. Given that the AIFF files on the CD are only converted from lossy MP3 files, is this to do with how the CD/Amp deals with the music, or something else?

People make the mistake all too often that a big club PA system is actually creating a high quality reproduction of the source material being played on it.

It's not!

I've DJed in many clubs over the years, and unless it's an exceptionally good system in a club designed to be acoustically pretty much perfect, you'll barely tell the difference between a 320 MP3 and a WAV. I'll agree with you entirely there.

The "I used to DJ, I know about sound quality" argument is all too often rolled out though, and 9 times out of 10 they'll barely be able to appreciate proper sound quality any better than your average Joe. I'm not saying that's you per se, just the amount of times I've heard it would make you wince too!

Really didn't want to get drawn into this again....... IME the sound quality difference between high bit rate MP3s and low bit rate MP3s over a decent big PA system is very, very noticeable. The difference between 320KBPS MP3s and WAV - very hard to tell IMO. Given that as you say MP3 algorithms bin some of the low end (and that's quite important in bass heavy dance music) it makes sense really.

Sound quality is a law of diminishing returns, I'm not denying that, but if you're at all an audiophile (or pretending to be) and can't tell the difference between a 320 MP3 and a WAV for the same recording, on a decent reference monitor setup, then I'm sorry you won't cut the mustard! But that's probably why I'm hoping for a career in the music production industry...

Big difference between an audiophile and a sound engineer (in fact most sound engineers laugh at audiophiles IME). By the other thread you've done one year at uni - you're adopting a pretty condescending tone considering! I'm not going to claim to be a 'proper sound engineer' as I'm not as technically minded as some and haven't worked in high end professional recording environments. But I've a degree in music performance and production, and have made a full time living from music (including live sound and recording in a studio, making music for adverts etc) for the last 7 years. Good luck with the career in the music production industry as the vast majority of music tech graduates end up working in Maccy D's.

I'll ask again - did you really do a properly controlled double blind test?

I'm all kinds of geeky about Audio Quality though (I'd use 96 or even 192KHz sample rate if practical, and always produce at 24 bit rather than 16 before dithering the final production down to 16 bit for use on commercial audio equipment).

You sound like one of those guys who obsesses over largely undetectable technical details, while forgetting that a great recording is much more about getting a great performance out of the artist. I'm guessing you know about the Nyquist theorem - if people can only hear up to 20khz (probably quite a bit less in your thirties having done lots of DJing), what do you consider the advantage of using such high sample rates to be exactly?

OP - sorry! It seems like you've got the info you needed anyway though. 🙂

BTW I have CDs burned from 320kbps constant rate MP3s and they sound like crap on my stereo.

Where did you get the MP3s from? Because you can have a '320KBPS' MP3 that was actually encoded at a lower rate, but someone has re-encoded at 320KBPS - obviously that doesn't replace the lost data, but it will still claim to be 320KBPS.

Both of you say you have worked as DJs. Given that you've been in very loud environments for prolonged periods, do either of you actually beleive your hearing is optimum, and good enough to hear any actual 'differences'? Because all the DJs I've known have had slight to moderate hearing loss, and are the people I'd least trust to judge sound quality of audio equipment.

Where did you get the MP3s from?

I encoded them myself, I won't say any more to avoid incriminating myself!

Would this [url= http://www.whathifi.com/review/dragonfly ]Dragonfly[/url] do? Just saw it on the What Hifi website a couple of minutes ago....

Sidney

Both of you say you have worked as DJs. Given that you've been in very loud environments for prolonged periods, do either of you actually beleive your hearing is optimum, and good enough to hear any actual 'differences'? Because all the DJs I've known have had slight to moderate hearing loss, and are the people I'd least trust to judge sound quality of audio equipment.

Nope, I don't - and I doubt mboy does either. I'm always very suspicious of people's claims to have 'golden ears'. I definitely have some hearing loss at the higher end (though this comes with age anyway).

Not a great article but interesting.....

[b]The experts, who between them have some of the best ears in the business, could not consistently tell the difference between the original and the lossy. The championVorbis was the overall champion, topping the charts in two categories: 128Kbps and over 300Kbps. [/b]

But the results probably say more about individual perception then codec technology.

The fact that four out of the five judges thought Vorbis and AAC sounded better than the original WAV at 128Kbps is a curious thing indeed.

It's worth noting lossy's underlying technology is founded on perceptual coding, which is based around a psycho-acoustic model of human hearing.

In plain English, the bits of audio that are messed with in a compressed audio file are based on an opinion of how humans hear, rather than on any fundamental laws of maths or physics.

In the case of MP3, a group of scientists in Germany (The Franhofer Institute) decided amongst themselves what to chuck out and what to keep, so it's probable the sound will be coloured to a degree and therefore may actually sound better than the original to some people.

http://www.djmag.com/news/detail/445

You sound like one of those guys who obsesses over largely undetectable technical details, while forgetting that a great recording is much more about getting a great performance out of the artist.

To your average Joe, the camera in my iPhone gives very high quality photos. Why on earth do you need to lug that 5D around? Most compacts have more megapixels blah blah blah 😉

I can quite successfully distinguish between CDs and 320 kbps MP3s ripped back to CD. Personally I'd rather listen to LPs, and do so often, but a lot of that has to do with the impurities the format giving a warmer sound, rather than a truly faithful reproduction of the studio masters.

Getting back to the OP... I was in a similar predicament and was looking at Sonos etc, but came up with a ghetto alternative.

I bought one of these off ebay for about £50 and hooked it up to aux input on my existing hifi amp.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/PURE-Flow-Portable-Internet-Radio/dp/B004E9SLOK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347971910&sr=8-1

As well as being great to access obscure radio stations from all around the world, it comes with flow server software which allows you you to stream from your computer over your WiFi network.

Sound quality is pretty good all things considered and you can browse albums, artists or playlists from the unit itself. With the battery pack, I can also take it out in the garden, kitchen or garage and listen to music from the computer there.

Well.. when you get into how records are actually mastered, that's another game altogether. As I understand it (I am not a sound engineer) what goes onto the CD is manipulated for its target audience, their taste and possibly their typical equipment, rather than actual fidelity. Most CDs already don't sound anything like being there.

Well I've got back from Maplin, plugged their unbranded DAC in and I'm pretty happy with the sound. It's got a real banging donk on it. I tried as many A-B tests as I could including the BBC iPlayer vs BBC FM radio and it's a lot better than the squeezed sound through the laptop's headphone socket.

Now where to get a 15 metre USB cable, then I wouldn't have to move stuff around...

And in answer to the last post - listen to Sympathy for the Devil by the Stones. That was mastered to sound great on a Dansette, which is what most kids had back then, - and it does

It's got a real banging donk on it.

Now where to get a 15 metre USB cable, then I wouldn't have to move stuff around...

Maplin? or Scan.co.uk.

Fiio E10 Dac? Nice and cheap and sound very good.

Grum, only on my phone so relatively short reply...

Firstly, apologies, re-read what I wrote and can see how it reads a bit condescending. Didn't mean it to sound like that as such.

Secondly, pretty much wholeheartedly agree with everything you've said aside from the 320KBPS MP3 vs WAV file in comparison. For whatever reason, I find it easy, as have my peers when we did it. Possibility that it was accentuated by the music we were listening to for the recording though being particularly bassy dance music, something more midrange orientated would be much less cut and dry probably.

Thirdly, familiar with Nyqvist's theorem, and why 44.1KHz is considered to be an optimum sample rate. But the arguments are there for the harmonic frequencies we can't hear affecting the sounds we can hear in a recording. You might be right though, maybe I'm obsessing. I'd rather listen to my music collection as MP3's for the rest of my life than I would listen to ANY Heavy Metal ever, even if it was recorded in DVD audio or even SACD format! A good piece of music is a good piece of music, but I'd rather we didn't compromise on the quality in order to get there too.

And finally (for now) I remember at 16 in a physics lesson we did the sine wave hearing test. I could still hear it at over 20KHz back then. I'm 32 now, did the same test last term with my peers, and I could only hear up to about 18.5KHz whereas the guys at 18 and 19 could still hear up to about 20KHz... This amused them all greatly, calling me an old bastard! As for my hearing, it's not perfect, but then nobody's is. I've taken precautions when DJing and in clubs for years as I know how important my hearing is, and how many top name DJ's are almost deaf now! My hearing is not going to be as good as someone who's spent most of their life in total silence, but (like you) I know what I'm listening out for. I'n not new to all this, only new to actually studying it in a structured way, I've been messing about with music and playing it, engineering it and making it for nigh on 15 years so far, and whilst it hasn't yet been able to support me full time, I've certainly made a good few quid out of it so far... 🙂

Now where to get a 15 metre USB cable, then I wouldn't have to move stuff around...

USB 2.0 provides for a maximum cable length of 5 meters for devices running at Hi Speed (480 Mbit/s). So be prepared for more expense as you pay for the necessary amplification , and the subsequent drop in sound quality! 🙂

Mboy, top end hearing is not the be all and end all of sound. Most damage is done to your mid range hearing.

Some of us have been earning a crust at this for over 45yrs, you know.

Well thanks for this thread. When I bought a Vista box I couldn't get a driver for my old external Soundblaster so I just plugged the jack from the amp into the headphone socket, with the results you'd expect. This thread inspired me to check for a Vista compatible driver and I found one. 8)

I have an arcam rpac and am very impressed with the results, I am no expert but it was comparible to my marantz ki signature mk2 cd player (pretty reasonable device held in pretty good regard.) I did a few blind tests on family and a lot of considered listening to see if I had made the right choice or if I will use it as a stepping stone until I could afford a audiolab m-dac, for the price and the application I am using it for I am very happy.

slightly off topic, but one of the first things I would do is get the music off your laptop & on to a raided hard drive.

Sooner or later your laptop will either have a hard drive fail, go up in smoke or get nicked.

I've seen a "High speed USB2 15M active repeater extension cable" but with a warning that some isoch devices won't work. Does that mean I'll be losing sound quality?

And because I'm old & dull I tend to back my stuff up. Music files etc synced between laptop, desktop, phone and external hard drive.

I've seen a "High speed USB2 15M active repeater extension cable" but with a warning that some isoch devices won't work. Does that mean I'll be losing sound quality?

No, you won't lose sound quality by using a usb extension, not in an audio sense as in the audio will sound worse. However with cheap USB extensions, it maybe just won't work at all. You may get complete gaps in your audio or similar rubbish. Isochronous devices means audio and video devices, ie. exactly what you're trying to plug into it, so it may well not work.

Having said that you're only bunging out one channel and don't have anything else on the USB extension like a hub, so you might be lucky.

Stupid question, but I think no one has asked it - I take it your amp doesn't have optical or spdif inputs, as that'd be a much better way to deal with this situation than running big USB cables, and a USB soundcard supporting it would be dirt cheap.

USB 2.0 provides for a maximum cable length of 5 meters for devices running at Hi Speed (480 Mbit/s). So be prepared for more expense as you pay for the necessary amplification , and the subsequent drop in sound quality!

USB is a digital signal - if you use an extender that supports high speed devices, there will be no drop in sound quality, as the digital to audio conversion happens after the USB lead. If you use an extender that doesn't fully support high speed devices, all hell will break loose and you'll get no sound or gaps, pops and horrible noises. You're unlikely to get any situation in between.