till I am curious how the analoge output of the SB2 will sound related to the ones I use now....
On paper, ie the DAC chip in use, the SB2 DAC should significantly out-perform the one in the SB1. I never liked the analog outs of the SB1 and I'm expecting the one on the SB2 indeed to be better - not that I'll be using them.
However, assuming the chip is made by one of a small number of decent manufacturers - Crystal, Burr-Brown (which is now part of TI, isn't it?), AKM... it really doesn't matter much what it is: you choose them on design, price and availability criteria and know they'll work quite nicely, especially if you tweak the reference design a bit. The main things that make a DAC sound good include stable, clean power supplies without RF on them, good board design and grounding, generally multi-layer boards are helpful, extremely low-jitter clocking, optionally FIFO buffering, and high-quality analog design with plenty of distance from the digits. Some of these are quite hard to achieve in a small digital box. Or a large one for that matter, which is why it's hard to get on-board DACs to sound that good in a PC - outboard units can be much better, though you can do those badly too.
--Richard E
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