What's the cool low-budget soundcard/DAC these days?

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I've been completely out of it for a number of years. But all this talk of music servers has me interested.

I used to have an RME DIGI96/8 PAD sound card that was the best of its type that I knew of at the time (about 10 years ago). I stopped doing music production stuff, and gave that away to a friend who's been doing archival transfers of 78's for a museum (a worthy cause).

So now all I have is a lowly $30 USB sound card for playing the odd CD rip from Foobar 2000.

If I can get my hands on a reasonable 2005-vintage PC with PCI slots and USB ports, what would be the best $100 DAC or sound card for playback of up to 24bit/192kHz files? Or would I be limited to 24bit/96kHz at that budget? I suppose that would be OK.

Where to start? M-Audio Audiophile 2496? Or is that too old?

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I have that Behringer USB sound card, the UCA202. It's not bad. Really, not bad at all. NwAvGuy's review revealed that the headphone amp part of it is not very good, but the line outs sound very good to me -- especially for $30 USD.

I guess NwAvGuy's ODAC would be the obvious next step up.

M2Tech HiFace 2 at $229 USD is in a whole other league, price wise.
http://www.musicdirect.com/p-92497-m2tech-hiface-2-usb-to-spdif-interface.aspx
 
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I have Behringer UCA202, but my friends HIFIMEDIY SABRE USB DAC ES9023 96KHZ/24BIT is head and shoulders above it. The sound is more involving. The cost is also pretty much the same (about GBP25). SABRE can be had in asynchronous mode (10GBP more). Don't know whether it sounds better.

Greg

PS SABRE is has only output. Behringer has in and out. Works fine for me for measuring speakers.
 
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You can do like I did "build" your own (sort of). I bought a USB-->SPDIF board based on the CM6631A (24/192, asynchronous) for $30 and a DAC board based on Wolfson 8740 for $40 and then hard-wired them together into a cheap ($10) DIY chassis. $80 and to me it sounds better than commercial DACs such as Cambridge's DACMagic and HotAudio DACWOW.

If I was to do it today, I would use similar boards, but with I2S headers so I could bypass SPDIF stage. This can be done for under $100, no problem.
 
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