I think it is worth buying a powered speaker with onboard DAC since the DAC in the computer is poor. I have PSB and Audioengine. I returned a second set of audioengine since it wouldn't set as the default speaker and I had to go select it every time I plugged my compute in. I contacted them and they said "we've heard about that, maybe we will fix it in a future release". So returned them and got PSB. Very good. Jerry
