I've recently traded my Linn majik amp/mimik cd -with a little money :-)- for a Primare Spa21
surround amp. I really stopped believing in the concept of going to get a disk and putting it in a
device to enjoy some music.

So now I am left with the problem of an audio source. The last year or so I used my xbox with xbmc
to play 192 kbps mp3 through toslink to my marantz sr5300 as preamp, through to the linn majik to my
audio physics virgo speakers.

With the spa21 I soon found out I had not been getting the most out of my speakers in this way to
say the least.
Now I intend to put my entire cd collection as flac lossless compressed audio on a pc as source.
Since the amp and speakers are (not high end bit still) quite nice i don't want to go cheap on
anything that might improve on the digital coax out of my asus motherboard.
Also the dealer of the primare advised me to connect the computer through toslink as an electric
connection between pc and primare might cause a lot of noise to be picked up (maybe he meant hum
caused by ground-loops?).

I keep hearing that producing all the bits and bytes at the right tempo is what really make
expensive stuff stand out against cheap stuff. But I also keep hearing that conclusions to that
effect are never validated by double blind tests and there's a lot of placebo effect and snobism
around. I'm curious if there's some consensus about which soundcard is far superior in producing
digital audio data.