Send music from computer to Receiver?

You definitely want to use a higher-end sound card. I recommend the audiophile 2496 from m-audio. The quality of the pci card vs a usb connection is immeasurable.

i'll second the recommendation of m-audio, their products (both mac and PC) are great!!

http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.main&ID=adf95efc30b88aba043fa8b83343bfb8 (what a steal, for what you get!!)

I recommend m-audio too. A word of warning, many soundcards with a digital output will resample the signal before sending it out. For example the Soundblaster Extigy resamples 44.1kHz signals to 48kHz. This sounds bad. The m-audio cards don't have this problem. Look for "bit-for-bit digital output" or something like it on their website.

On the question of whether to go with a internal or external card. If you are piping the digital signal to an external DAC then use an internal soundcard with an S/PDIF output. USB interfaces take use up processing power and the sound will skip when the computer is being used intesively (oddly enough scrolling a window is a processor intensive operation). But if you are going to use the analog ouputs of a card then definately go with an external soundcard. It will sound much better. The internal soundcard gets interference generated by the computer.

If you go with a digital out, I've had good luck with jitter reduction devices like the Monarchy DIP. Evidently soundcards don't output the cleanest digital signals.

This could be a great answer at $99 for some. http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/powerwave/. Many features and digital amp.

Dave

This seems like a good question. For my part, this question came up in my home recently. My choices are:

XM Radio subscription and hardware purchase.
Upgrade of my Cable TV subscription to include some radio channels.
Internet-Based Radio and downloads.

Monthly subscription fees for each of these would be very roughly the same ($10) except the cable TV package upgrade unfortunately costs about $22 per month I think.

If I could figure out a way to use my existing cable-internet connection and beam it to my hi-fi with decent fidelity, I might consider doing this. Yes, it's a very geeky wierd project, but whatever. I think it would be a fun project, and might allow me to integrate my internet radio with some music download purchases. I do have a wireless router I'm not using, so I'm wondering if that could be a way to set up some sort of "receiver" near my hi-fi that could receive the signal, instead of stringing a wire across the house.

Or maybe there's such a thing as a purpose built internet radio "receiver" (i.e., that would allow me to not have to keep my computer tuned in all the time?)