optical out sound card for linux?

[tleslie]

I just upgraded my Sennheiser HD570 to the new HD650 their best head
phones.

Now plugged into my SB live sound card,
the high energy song mixed with huge bass cause the
headphones to make that bass sound like someone 
hitting a shoe box with a hammer, its bad.

I read that with highest end head phones, they are 
"extremely high impedance headphones"
and they can suck large with cheap 
sound amps, and I am guessing a sound blaster
card is just that.

So i am going to buy a bithead head phone amp
that is suggested as a cheap amp (400$) for a HD650
(good ones go for about 4-5K$ and I ain't going there 
now),
so I want to feed the head phone amp with a optical
input, and thus have a optical output
from the sound card.

Has anyone in the group used a sound card on Linux
with optical output?
Does it "just work" ?
Anything special I need to do or know,
any recommended cards?
Obviously the card needs to work well with Linux.

I assume that the card would just act as a digital pass through,
not distorting the sound in any way by cheap analogue electronics?
I am seeing references to digital sound over USB,
anyone ever do that on Linux ... I have never even heard of that before,
and wondering if it is just a windows only device driver thing.

Until I get this fixed, I have to avoid playing certain songs :(
So ironic, get a amazing headphone, and can't play as much music with
it until paired with an amp, I guess even if i researched and found this
out before hand, i still would have bought the HD650, I just would have
bought a amp at the same time!

as an aside, any one comment on how much better a 5K$ headphone amp is
over a 400$ one? I am hoping this is a case of 400$ gives you 99.1% 
and the 5K$ gives you 100% and is only worth it if you have money to
burn, and that in general there is almost no difference.


-tl

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists