MW Oppo 83 vs. Macbook pro

When a friend let me borrow his Nuforce DAC-9 I was blown away with how good it sounded. In fact my Modwright tube Oppo 83 sounded better when it went through the dac versus without the dac! I posted a short review of the DAC-9 on the Polk Audio forum here: http://www.polkaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?135994-Nuforce-DAC-9

So today as an experiment I used my Macbook pro laptop using itunes, Bitperfect, a cheap usb cable and the Dac-9 vs. my MW Oppo/Dac-9 combo. I played the same song and toggled between the inputs on the Dac and I was just shocked to hear that they sounded virtually the same! I tried several more cd's and came to the conclusion that my Macbook pro sounded just a smidgen more clear, but it was hardly noticeable. I'm still trying to digest this finding.

Obviously, I'm late coming into the computer audio world. My findings today are a game changer for sure. This will change my whole approach to audio now. I'm also sure that with more tweaking I can take this up another couple notches with a nicer cables, tweaking the features on the Bitperfect program, more RAM, etc.

I noticed that in the middle of my experiment the music from my laptop started to collapse and crackle. I checked it out and found that the computer was in the middle of receiving an email and this heavily impacted the music. So I shut down all open programs and that seemed to fix it.

I also ordered a Belkin Gold USB cable, which hopefully will be better than the stock usb cable I hijacked from my printer. The latest issue of TAS did a shoot out on 5 USB cables and the reviewer had been using the Belkin Gold as his reference. Of course he upgraded after doing the shoot out, but for $11, I owe it to myself to hear the Belkin Gold.