I'm a hard core audiophile and proud audio tech geek for home stereos/speakers.
My last 10yrs of experience has convinced me to continue using an external USB DAC to pull raw digital data of any sound from the laptop/net book/PC to feed it to the D/A USB DAC and then pull it out of the DAc as analog stereo RCA and feed it to the stereo amp/receiver. If u shop for USB dacs you will see them mostly costing between $300 and 1000. However being the audiophile geek I am, I've found the Peachtree DacIt costing $450 to be the best in perf and price combo. Human ears can't detect the diff really between the $1k DAC's and the $400 range ones. there is another USB DAC the 1300SE from stereo-link.com costing $300 which I've been using for last 10yrs until 2mo ago when I switched to the DacIT from Peachtree. reason is that Stereo-link themselves admit as my experience shows that with Win7 computers there exists a 50% chance it won't work with your PC due to some unresolvable signal degradation issue. Your second Q: I pipe JFW as well as all other sounds/music/streams through my DAC/home stereo when I plug the DAC USb in to my computer. If u want u can go to the JFW window under utilities and then sound card and select the sound card u want JFW to talk through. I don't prefer this as when I'm playing my music out loud I can't hear JFW if I'm piping JFW via my PC speakers. good luck! Prateek -----Original Message----- From: pc-audio-boun...@pc-audio.org [mailto:pc-audio-boun...@pc-audio.org] On Behalf Of Steve Jacobson Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 7:17 AM To: PC Audio Discussion List Subject: Separating Speech Synthesizer from Music and Streams Hi, I have a Netbook that I'd like to use specifically for playing music and perhaps streams through my stereo system. Ideally, I would like to separate the speech I get from Window-Eyes from what I hear through my stereo. I know there are some pretty decent inexpensive USB sound cards that would probably do the job. Since I am looking at this for playback and not recording, I am not concerned about inputs but I'd like to have reasonable output quality. Therefore, I have two questions. Does anyone have good or bad experiences with USB sound cards? Second, does there seem to be an advantage in allowing the music and streaming outputs to remain on the built-in sound card and moving my screen reader to the external one or is the reverse better? Window-Eyes does let me select the sound card. Thanks in advance. Best regards, Steve Jacobson To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: pc-audio-unsubscr...@pc-audio.org To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: pc-audio-unsubscr...@pc-audio.org
