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To: HerbVic who wrote (84902)	9/3/2009 5:58:50 PM
From: Stock Puppy	Respond to of 154011

I think a lot would have to do with the design of the DAC board/section in the computer. A "bare naked" DAC where the processor has to spoon feed it each piece of data at a constant rate would affect your load a lot more than an optimized DAC system running under, say, direct memory access - the processor only needs to know that at specific time intervals the memory has to be refreshed, the DAC sucks the data out of memory and feeds its buffer whenever it needs it. Or for a more down to earth metaphor, think of when you were dating - some dates are high maintenance and others are low, depends who you go out with. Since communications circuitry takes into account that it has to keep things efficient, let the computer take care of the talking and it's probably better in the long run to have a high quality digital amplifier take care of the DAC - for many of us, computers tend to get upgraded (and boards lose compatibility) more often than our beloved audio stuff. Then you can attach your monster cables and enjoy every nuance of the smooth proximal inductive reactance's coming out from your amplifier rather than the harsher sounding proximal inductive reactance's coming out from your computer. :-)