• Send music to the DAC via a USB connection
• Provide storage for the music
• User Interface to the DAC

Send Music to the DAC via a USB connection:
The USB (Universal Serial Bus) uses two wires of the four wire cable to send data and is a reliable data bus in that the data that the computers sends is exactly the same as the data received by DAC. The cost, quality, brand of the computer or brand of USB cable is not a factor in the resulting sound quality. The music/data is tansferred in small 1ms blocks over the USB connection into a buffer in the DAC. The DAC is responsible for clocking out this data at exactly 44.1 kHz.

Provide Storage for the music:
The music can be stored on the computer which is connected to the DAC or can be stored on external drive(s) or network. The music is stored as files and is usually compressed to save space.

The lossless FLAC compression format is the current audiophile format.

User Interface to the DAC:
The best sounding player today (April 2008) is XXHighEnd running on Vista 32bit or Windows 2008 Server 32bit.
I used to be a big Foobar and before that Winamp fan (using ASIO4ALL driver) until I tried XXHighEnd. XXHighEnd is currently a beta product and costs money.
You can get by using it in Demo mode as I have for the past couple months. In demo mode it stops every 20 minutes or something like that.

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