There are many firewire devices that do a great job and can be pricy, including the Metric Halo that JA uses on occasion. My next upgrade for my desktop would be the Digital Audio Labs Card Delux. Others can chime in, but I am not sure that there is much better at their current $399 asking price with both digital and Balance audio I/O operating at 24/96.
Digital Audio Labs

Metric Halo

Apogee

M-Audio

I am using an Echo Indigo I/O card in my laptop for listening and recording. I am coming of the opinion that it is a better playback dac than a recording adc, but for the $165 street price I cannot complain at all.

Quote:
Are the Audigy 24-bit cards really hi-fi in quality? I have a first-gen Audigy card and it does well through my Klipsch 5.1 speakers. I'm not so sure how it would do in sending an RCA cable stereo signal out to my listening room system... Do I need to do a digital shot and decode in the listening room? If so, with what...?

I would love to hear more from people who are making this card work.

I too have an audigy first gen and have tried to send RCA to my listening system. Unfortunately it sounded pretty disappointing, very very noisy (as the computer is a pretty noisy environment i guess).

Using an old mini-disk player with an optical in, to serve as a low quality external dac did help with the noise issue, but the old MD players aren't exactly Hi-Fi, the setup wasn't exactly convenient, and the sound wasn't exactly good. The Idea of a Squeezebox has been tugging at me for some time, and stereophile's recent endorsement hasn't helped.

One question I have is weather the sound-card effects the ultimate quality of playback, when a song is kept entirely in the digital domain until the squeezebox or external dac does the decoding? and if so, how?

A few trusted links would suffice, but the opinions of those like Mr travaglia, Jeff, JA and other experts, are greatly appreciated.