Internal Sound card or external DAC?

[H4wklord]

Hi, I'm in the process of ripping all my CD's to a hard drive to gain some room back and manage my music better.
My PC is currently connected to an Onkyo 805 via HDMI through my ATI HD4870 graphics card. The onkyo is connected to an Arcam A75+ integrated amp and P90 power amp to drive my Linn Ninka fronts.
The Onkyo does a reasonable job but is completely inferior to my current Naim CD5i cd player with regard to the sound performance.

What is my best option to improve sound quality in this case for £200 ish?

Buy a suitable internal sound card and output to the Arcam direct via anologue outs or output digitally and use and external DAC to feed an analog source to the Arcam?

Any audio Guru's have an opinion on what's likely to give me the best results?

thanks

 

[wij]

I'd feed the digital output of your motherboard into an external DAC and then feed that into the stereo input of your Arcam.

Assuming you're buying new for £200 there is the newly released Cambridge Audio DAC Magic, plenty of inputs and both single ended and balanced output stages. Gets good reviews although I've not heard it myself.

A little lower down the price range is the Beresford DAC, think its around the £150 mark. A lot of people rave about these on the forums but I had one for a couple of months and really didn't think it was all that special.

Personally I think your CD5i will still sound significantly better than both of those options though.

If you don't mind looking second hand you could perhaps pick up a Beresford for a bit less (plenty come up on the auction site all the time) or maybe an older generation Musical Fidelity DAC.