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Topic: Help needed with USB DAC selection (Read 3068 times) previous topic - next topic
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Help needed with USB DAC selection

Greetings!

I was happy using my E-MU 1616m PCIe audio interface for music listening and occasional electric guitar tomfoolery through software amp sim, that is until it finally gave up working on Windows 1903. (Can't blame it, really, it's 12 years old and the last official driver is, IIRC, for Windows Vista). As a temporal solution, I've rolled back to 1809, but that is, frankly, less than ideal :)

So I humbly ask for suggestions. I'm ready to give up guitar tomfoolery (don't play much, and software amp sims tend to suck anyway). So no analog inputs and ADC is needed. Don't want to bother with glitchy/unsupported drivers anymore, so it must be USB class compliant (i.e. work without proprietary drivers on all major OSes). I have a pair of active monitors and headphones, so I need a balanced line out and a headphone amp. I want all this in a single metal enclosure with its own power supply. Quick googling and lurking shows a lot of potentially good and inexpensive (I love China!) candidates meeting the above requirements. But, sadly, there's a small little catch: I reaaaly want a parametric EQ, so I can compensate for a pesky room resonance around 120 Hz in my room (or maybe it's my monitors). And the EQ must apply only to the line out, of course, so that the headphone sound remains untouched. Couldn't find anything good and inexpensive meeting these requirements on my own, so decided to try my luck here. Hope I'm not being too annoying and someone can help me.

Thanks in advance!

P.S.: Well, actually, I did find one solution: RME ADI-2 DAC. It looks sooo pretty and it has everything I want, and doesn't have anything I don't want. But it's just so expensive! Surely there must be a more cost effective solution from good people in China (or some some other part of the world)?