Have been listening to mine for the past few hours and yes, it does make a difference, I was actually wondering about that
The two things that struck me immediately were a tighter bass and more detail. I'm using this with my media computer, medium priced Asus motherboard with onboard evverything including Nvidia 8200 graphics.
Toslink out to converter to co-ax, into the DAC and onto switcher.
I bought from
Here cost £44.84 inc postage, parcel marked as gift so no import duty.
I chose that one from lots of 'em simply because it seemed to be the cheapest. Ordered on the 16th, arrived 23rd, pretty good, one week delivery.
The transformer lists two 9V rails as the pair of blues and the pair of whites but in fact the only combination of those wires to give me 9V was the pair of whites. The blues gave 5V, not that it mattered much.
So, 45 quid for board & TX; a tenner for the Toslink/coax converter; twelve pounds for a case from maplins and about four quid for sockets and mains cable make total cost about £71.00.
You can buy a ready made one in a case for around 85 but their case is silver and I wanted a black one. I will probably fly the onboard power LED to the front of the case and add a power switch.
Apart from lots of FLAC files also listened to the first part of 'Echoes' from the Pink Floyd at Pompeii film from an avi file on the computer and that sounded quite marvellous. I do love that track in the film, always gets me tingly, Pink Floyd get funky and oooooo, weren't they young back then? My goodness.