Audiophile USB to PCM

I'm not worried about the Big Ben right now... neither the Waveterminal nor Audiophile have arrived yet.

Okay, I emailed Apogee. The Big Ben will reclock the signal and keep it in digital. The Mini-Dac will not. The Mini-Dac reclocks the signal and then converts it to analog. Afterall, it is a digital to analog converter.

Right. I wasn't implying the Big Ben could replace a DAC or PC audio device.

The Big Ben is design to act as a master digital clock in a recording studio environment. If you're running three or more pieces of digital equipment all sort of gremlins start to appear if you try to clock the devices in a chain-like manner. The Big Ben provides a very high quality master clock that all the various digital equipment can sync to. While it may work as a jitter reduction device, it probably is overkill for all but the most high end of audiophile systems. Particularly if you D/A reclocks or upsamples, the Big Ben is really not needed.

Winchell, I'm interested to hear what you think about the Audiophile. I'm still using it for the simple reason that I don't feel like shelling out more money for a product that isn't all the way there. We are very much in the early growing pains in terms of products dealing with hdd playback. A year from now, I am convinced, will present us with vastly better/more options. The M-Audio is fine, but it's definitely the weak link. The other reason why I'm still living with it is because my next product is definitely going to give me the capability of browsing with remote from the couch. It is a PAIN to not be able to skip around, pause or anything else. I know a few of these products exist already, but they either work 50% of the time, or they look like a bad alarm clock and none of them have the browsing capability I want.

I retrospect, I'm glad I only got the Audiophile, because I would not want to drop $1000+ and not be able to sit and enjoy the music without getting up constantly.