Electronic – Setting up the “Basic Bipolar Output Operation” connection on a DAC08 chip

First: DAC or ADC ? DAC makes no senses in your question here.

Second: you could always protect the input of the things you want to plug into your soundcard. Basic over voltage protection is easy achieve with a zener diode and a resistor.

Third: In fact input protection is compulsory here. You are talking about hot plugging something. Which means manipulation of the connectors, connecting things that are not at the same potential during the plugging etc. This is where a ESD discharges from the user or between the components may destroy your device. It's not a problem for the sound card which should be correctly protected otherwise it wouldn't have passed the norms.

You need to work out what sort of specifications you need because DACs come in all sorts of varieties from the basic ladder network all the way up to very high speed ones. A cursory glance at Maxim shows they make around 350 varieties alone, so you can imagine the quantity of DACs available on the market by the rest of the big guys.

Basic things to consider when choosing a DAC:

• Current or Voltage? Because there are DACs for both types.
• Speed. If you're sampling greater than 1MHz then you need to consider specialized high-speed DACs.
• Precision. A barebones 10-bit DAC will give you 2^10 levels, which on 5V will give you 4.8mV precision. Does your application need a finer resolution than that? If so, then you need a higher-bit DAC. A DAC IC will have less error and thermal variance than a R-2R network with 5% resistors.
• Interface. Serial DACs are available which will take up only a data and clock line, or tie into peripherals such as SPI or I2C. Parallel DACs take up a lot of lines but are trivial to drive.
• Form factor. Things like DIPs and SOTs are easy to prototype with. VFNs/BGAs are basically impossible without a reflow station.

I'd say you'd be fine with a DAC0808 which is an inexpensive 8 bit parallel ADC.