I want to ask audiophiles if is recommended to listen music from digital lossless sources, like .flac from a pc sound card or is essential an external cd.

Are cards like Audigy or Live enough for excellent sound or do i need profesional sound cards? (Obviously passing trough good amplifier and speaker).

get a soundcard with digital out, important: non-internal-resampling 44.1->48 kHz.
of course, then you need a DAC externally, eg. in your receiver/amp/DAT.

or:

good soundcard with good analogue out.

iirc, the Creative cards like audigy or soundblaster (live) are famous for bad resampling.
Terratec EWX 2496 or M-Audiophile 24/96 or better (192 kHz are "standard" these days lol) will do fine.

Why not let your ears decide instead of someone else?

Yes.

Lossy too, btw, like AAC, Ogg Vorbis and high VBR Lame produced MP3s.

But why are you asking? You can simply see for yourself. Or are you interested in technical details? In that case, just ask

It's sometimes difficult for a listener to compare two audio equipment setups for a couple of reasons. First, the equipment might be inaccessible. There are not a lot of computer audio show rooms around, and it could be impractical to buy/borrow all of the equipment to do a side by side comparison.

If the listener is inexperienced, he might have difficulty in assessing the relative sound quality of two setups. In my own experiences, I've outgrown my audio equipment a number of times as I've become more discerning. Sometimes it makes sense for the listener to buy equipment that exceeds his current standards. That way when he becomes more mature, he grows into the equipment and avoids the cost of upgrading once more.

For these reasons, reading reviews and asking for others' opinions could be helpful, if not essential, in buying new equipment.

HI,

I love my Lynx card, and recommend it highly to any audiophile. I run it directly into may Pass/ Magnepan system, and it is significantly better than my old trans dac combo (which was no slouch)

Personally, I wouldn't bother with a lossy format. I could easily hear the difference when I ABX'ed it between .wavs and 192 mp3s. MAYBE 320 would be transparent to the original, but with hard drive space being cheap I don't see the need for my collection...it all fit easily as .wavs on a 160g disk.

YOu could use an external dac, but I chose the Lynx because it had 3 analog outs, I can use the PC as a digital crossover, it was one less box to have to shelve, and one less cable to buy.

The excellent values those days are :
- M-Audio Revolution 5.1 @65$
- E-MU 0202 (USB) @120$