Best audio path from old school Mac Mini to older school AV Receiver?

The basic problem is that the headphone output is a speaker amplifier, not going to give the best sound into a 47k RCA line input. If you have an original G4 Mac Mini (with a single headphone-sized jack), compatible driver software will be an issue for any add-on DAC.

Your receiver does not have a digital input for coax/optical, so even if you have a later Intel Mac Mini where the headphone out is also an optical out, you can't use that. The receiver does have a discrete analog 5.1 input, where the 6 channels of RCA are directly connected to the amp without tone or processing.

I have a couple of these made in Korea 5.1 Zalman ZM-RSSC external sound cards I used for DJing. They use the C-Media CM6206 USB DAC, 2x oversampling 16 bit 48kHz outputs with specs acceptable for CD-audio (PDF), and there are external volume controls for each set of three outputs. As it is a USB HID device it doesn't need a driver.



Can't sell mine as cheap as the guy on Amazon, but I can supply all the required cables.

 

I think this points out that 1st and foremost I need to get a newer computer in the Mancave.

When my external drive (with the bulk of my WAV library from CD and Vinyl rips) died 2 years ago, I was sad to realize that although the Mac Mini was still working fine, it couldn't talk to my bigger/newer (2014) external drive.

Lesson learned...

Something about the old AVR2400 with the old cd player just sounds right to my ears.