Depending on the design of the DAC the quality of the sound card does not matter as long as it provides for bit perfect playback. The cards from M-audio seem to be popular on this forum and provide this.
Contemporary DAC designs support active jitter rejection either by providing a deep dejitter buffer e.g. Chord DAC64 or by using asynchronous resampling Bel Canto DAC2, Benchmark Media DAC1, and all Anagram Technology derived designs.
Most of the available DACs use integrated digital to analog converters from a few manufacturers. Two exceptions I know of are MSB technology platinum DAC and the Chord DAC64 with discrete converters.
The state of the art chips at this point are: Analog Devices AD1955, BurrBrown DSD/PCM1792, Crystal CS43122, AKM AK4395, Wolfson Microsystems WM8740.
Unfortunately I am unaware that any of these are available in an external 2 channel DAC as of yet. The Toshiba SD9500 has AD1955 DACs but that is really a DVD player which happens to have a digital input.
Chips from one generation behind are readily available in DACs. A particularly good deal seems to be the Benchmark DAC1 which also has an integrated analog volume control which I assume you will want for your application.
http://www.benchmarkmedia.com/digital/dac1/default.asp
Cheers
Thomas
Contemporary DAC designs support active jitter rejection either by providing a deep dejitter buffer e.g. Chord DAC64 or by using asynchronous resampling Bel Canto DAC2, Benchmark Media DAC1, and all Anagram Technology derived designs.
Most of the available DACs use integrated digital to analog converters from a few manufacturers. Two exceptions I know of are MSB technology platinum DAC and the Chord DAC64 with discrete converters.
The state of the art chips at this point are: Analog Devices AD1955, BurrBrown DSD/PCM1792, Crystal CS43122, AKM AK4395, Wolfson Microsystems WM8740.
Unfortunately I am unaware that any of these are available in an external 2 channel DAC as of yet. The Toshiba SD9500 has AD1955 DACs but that is really a DVD player which happens to have a digital input.
Chips from one generation behind are readily available in DACs. A particularly good deal seems to be the Benchmark DAC1 which also has an integrated analog volume control which I assume you will want for your application.
http://www.benchmarkmedia.com/digital/dac1/default.asp
Cheers
Thomas