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Comment by gchokov | Hacker News Reader

Nice, good and cheap amp ($19) mentioned at the bottom of the article, in case you need immediate boost over stock audio from your phone - http://nwavguy.blogspot.bg/2011/03/fiio-e5-headphone-amp.htm...

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Or when you are annoyed by a shitty soundcard in your business notebook, get a Behringer external DAC/soundcard for $29 ( http://nwavguy.blogspot.de/2011/02/behringer-uca202-review.h... )

I have a UCA202 (and a UFO202 - AFAIK it is identical but with a phono stage on the line ins) to use with my Surface (the build-in card is very noisy) and it is a noticeable improvement over the built-in card. Definitely recommended if you need a USB DAC without spending a fortune.

I use an Acer C720 Chromebook running Linux to drive my virtual piano software. I had no complaints with it's on-board audio performance, but after reading multiple exhortations on the internet about how much better external soundcards are, I bought a $5 USB soundcard widely available from multiple vendors on ebay. OK, I can just barely hear an improvement over the on-board. It's better in the sense of "significant" (ie definitely there), but it just isn't a material difference to me.

If I'm that deaf to the differences between these two sources, I'm curious if people think the UCA202 will change my life?

Really depends on the quality, noise floor, and hiss of your on-board sound-card. I've had motherboard where I tried the on-board card, didn't take me long to put in my old PCI card again.

Also depends on how "hard" your audio equipment to feed. You don't go hanging big speakers directly to your PC kind-of-thing.

The noise floor is the main issue with most cheap sound hardware. It's often loud, and not spectrally flat. You'll be able to hear more of your music at lower volumes if you get a high quality DAC with a low noise floor.

The other big issue is distortion/nonlinearity. This is much less of an issue than the noise floor, but can still be noticeable on cheap DACs.

It's likely that you can do a lot better than a $5 DAC on both of these factors.

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