I've been pondering this for a while. The built-in headphone jack and such in my laptop suck. Likewise, it would be nice to have an easy way to capture audio from my TiVo and get it into the computer and to digitize old tapes and records with high fidelity.

Solution? I've all but settled on an Onkyo SE-U55. Original list price was $249 but J&R Music World seems to strangely have them for $69.88, making them about half the cost of competing boxes.

It's got optical and coax digital I/O and RCA jacks for analog I/O, plus headphone and microphone port. This makes it basically the perfect box for DJing from a laptop, or dragging a laptop over to the TiVo for direct digital audio dumps.

Given the price, I suspect a close-out or some other deal that may not last. Get yours now...