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Alternatives to USB for my DAC

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Posted on April 29, 2015 at 22:35:35
Noxos
Audiophile

Posts: 2
Joined: April 29, 2015
 I'm getting popping noises with my new DAC and it seems from looking around a bit that the USB connection from PC to DAC is likely the culprit. What would be my best option as an alternative to USB?:

DAC specs:

http://www.audio-gd.com/Pro/dac/NFB732/NFB7.32EN.htm

Motherboard specs:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157503

Thanks.

 

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RE: Alternatives to USB for my DAC, posted on April 29, 2015 at 22:57:17
soundchekk
Audiophile

Posts: 2426
Joined: July 11, 2007
 Usually it's the OS setup causing these kind of issues.

Checkout if Audio-GD provides proprietary Windows drivers for their DACs.
Install them. The functionality offered by the DAC is not fully supported by Windows.

Once you managed that install Foobar2000 as player software.

You could also try a different device. E.g. an Android Smartphone with Android 5.0 installed.

Bottom line. I don't think it's your USB HW.

Good luck.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

blog latest >> The Audio Streaming Series - tuning kit pCP

 

RE: Alternatives to USB for my DAC, posted on April 29, 2015 at 23:00:01
Noxos
Audiophile

Posts: 2
Joined: April 29, 2015
 I've actually got the Audio-gd drivers installed already unfortunately. Set up in foobar as well :(.

 

RE: Alternatives to USB for my DAC, posted on April 30, 2015 at 02:57:55
Roseval
Audiophile

Posts: 1846
Joined: March 31, 2008
 Looks like both support Toslink, you might give it a shot

I have some USB trouble shooting tips on my website
The Well Tempered Computer

 

RE: Alternatives to USB for my DAC, posted on April 30, 2015 at 03:09:04
beppe61
Audiophile

Posts: 4705
Joined: January 29, 2004
Hi i guess you have already tested the optical out of your motherboard ... if not i would try. Even just for curiosity.
Maybe you like the sound. Better not to have prejudices with digital.
And when found a nice sound better to stick with that.
Kind regards,
bg

 

RE: Alternatives to USB for my DAC, posted on April 30, 2015 at 08:55:44
noway
Audiophile

Posts: 425
Location: Canada
Joined: August 28, 2007
 Have you tried Playback-Output-Buffer Length: (increasing to 3000 or more)?
and Advanced-Playback-Full File Buffering Up To (kB): set at 2 million?

Also disable your sound card if you are using Audio-gd drivers for audio and make sure Windows is set to use your Audio-gd drivers as default in Control Panel-Sounds

 

Not the dac it's your computer, posted on May 1, 2015 at 06:59:58
Gordon Rankin
Manufacturer

Posts: 2928
Joined: June 9, 2000
 N,

If you made your computer and put Windows on it, then it is probably not optimized for anything. If the motherboard came with a disk, then installing that might help.... but in my experience most of the drivers shipped with motherboards are really old.

You can go to the companies website and see if they have corrected drivers or determine what chips set you have and go to the company who makes those.

Thanks,
Gordon
J. Gordon Rankin

 

RE: Not the dac it's your computer, posted on May 1, 2015 at 17:12:43
Sprezza Tura
Audiophile

Posts: 4585
Location: New York City
Joined: August 24, 2012
 USB will be phased out in 3 years. Ethernet will rule.

 

" Ethernet will rule ", posted on May 1, 2015 at 23:29:46
beppe61
Audiophile

Posts: 4705
Joined: January 29, 2004
 Hi very interesting.
Is it a your hope or there are reliable information about this trend ?
Will this be a remarkable improvement ?
After reading about how difficult is to implement a good USB port i start to hate the standard deeply. It sounds me like not fit for the purpose.
And i wonder if to stick with this difficult port is a little perverse, especially when other and better standards are readily available ...
Like using RCA for spdif transfer instead of bnc ... and so on.
I hope in Ethernet a lot to solve this issue.
It costs almost nothing also.
Thanks for the information.
Kind regards,
bg

 

RE: Not the dac it's your computer, posted on May 2, 2015 at 08:22:48
Tony Lauck
Audiophile

Posts: 13629
Location: Vermont
Joined: November 12, 2007
 "USB will be phased out in 3 years. Ethernet will rule."

The benefit of Ethernet is more flexibility in complex environments, such studios and homes with multiple rooms requiring interconnection. Unfortunately, flexibility comes at additional costs in protocol complexity. Increased protocol complexity means more product cost and for high-end applications it means creating more electrical noise that will degrade audio quality unless additional costly isolation is required. This is a typical product positioning triangle, where the product manager is attempting to optimize three vertices of a triangle: cost, performance and flexibility. Since it is not possible to achieve all three simultaneously the market will segment based on different customer requirements. In addition, because both USB and Ethernet are interconnection standards there are legacy issues that further segment the marketplace, making it less likely that there will be rapid change.

In mid-fi applications Ethernet is already making inroads in multiple room systems, but it has yet to prove competitive in high-end applications. In addition there are at least two distinct Ethernet protocol approaches being pushed, DLNA and AES, which will further fragment the marketplace.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

 

RE: Alternatives to USB for my DAC, posted on May 2, 2015 at 09:48:12
Presto
Audiophile

Posts: 5957
Location: Canada
Joined: November 10, 2004
 Download the DPC latency checker and use it to troubleshoot.
1. I had a wireless network driver cause dropouts every 60s on the button - perhaps a poorly written driver that does something *vitally important* (not) every minute. Fixed that and dropouts were gone.
2. Are you using USB hard drive as well? Is your network adapter USB? Wireless keyboard transmitter? USB hard drive and DAC on the same USB port can be an issue. There are ways to figure out which ports are on which hubs - through the device manager under Universal Serial Bus Controllers. Click on USB Root Hub and Generic USB Hub and look at the power tab. It should show you which devices are on which (shared) hub. This way you can put different high-throughput devices (hard drive, DAC, etc.) on different or even dedicated hubs.
3. Try a USB expansion PCI-e card. Use it first for ONLY the DAC and then second ONLY for the hard drive. The same hub utilization tricks from #2 work here too...
4. Also, you should try and shut down any services you are not using but I cannot give "generic services" advice (due to different machines, OS, software, etc.) but I can say that there is a lot of background software that is just bling and stuff you don't use - and this is especially true with "pro" versions of windows with all kinds of networking features that home users seldom, if ever, use. You can learn up on tweaking services - Google is your friend. You can try www.blackviper.com and check out his windows service configuration tables, but experiment with services you are not 100% certain about at your own risk. It's good to track your default service settings for your machine so you can go back to what you started with if you suddenly have serious issues.

Cheers,
Presto

 

If you must use wireless, consider a wireless bridge, posted on May 2, 2015 at 14:56:38
Tony Lauck
Audiophile

Posts: 13629
Location: Vermont
Joined: November 12, 2007
 I've had endless problems with wireless drivers on several different Linux systems. These don't work very well (dropped packets, poor latency, low bandwidth, problems with system startup) and don't always recover from temporary interference or fading. In addition, they consume a large amount of processor time, particularly low end wireless interfaces that have minimal hardware and require the host processor (e.g. driver software) to do significant functions. Most of my Windows systems don't use wireless, so I've not a lot of experience with wireless drivers for Windows, except on an aged Windows XP lap-top where wireless was a disaster.

In some cases where the wireless activity disrupted the operation of the local computer, I've found it convenient to use a wireless bridge. I have a room where several computers reside that is not easily wired to my main network and I found that putting a wireless bridge in this room reduced the overhead on these computers, improving their performance. Surprisingly, the wireless performance was also improved, perhaps because the wireless bridge was dedicated to its particular function. Of course the network performance (latency and bandwidth) was still inferior to a wired connection, but I didn't want to drill a lot of holes in walls.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

 

RE: Alternatives to USB for my DAC, posted on May 2, 2015 at 16:23:22
coli
 d

 

RE: Alternatives to USB for my DAC, posted on May 3, 2015 at 00:35:57
beppe61
Audiophile

Posts: 4705
Joined: January 29, 2004

Hi may i ask:
1) why and
2) how ?

I have dacs accepting this input and i am using a cheap usb to AES/EBU interface.
Do you rate this port superior ?
Which card to use on the pc ?
Thanks a lot.
Kind regards,
bg

 

Tony thanks!, posted on May 4, 2015 at 08:25:05
Gordon Rankin
Manufacturer

Posts: 2928
Joined: June 9, 2000
 Tony,

Thanks for responding! I agree 110%... also Ethernet will probably go away and we will be left with WIFI and USBC.

They will have to replace Ethernet with something better and something optical only, because 10G is probably it for copper.

Thanks,
Gordon
J. Gordon Rankin

 

RE: Tony thanks!, posted on May 4, 2015 at 10:08:45
Tony Lauck
Audiophile

Posts: 13629
Location: Vermont
Joined: November 12, 2007
 There are a zillion commercial variants of Ethernet, going all the way back to the original 10 Mbps Ethernet on RG 8 U style triax dating to 1980. These are all compatible and can be easily interconnected with LAN bridges (which will also go between wired and wireless). Over time, there will be a zillion more, undoubtedly some will use copper wiring and others will use optical fibers.

I don't see wireless replacing cables for anything that is too big to be portable. For my entire life I have yet to see any radio system that provided the consistency and reliability of wired communication. In any event, "Etherenet" today means the packet format, not the PHY. With LAN bridges even the MAC isn't the defining aspect.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

 

RE: Tony thanks!, posted on May 9, 2015 at 08:19:28
Ugly
Audiophile

Posts: 2912
Location: Des Moines, WA
Joined: August 22, 2006
 "I don't see wireless replacing cables for anything that is too big to be portable. For my entire life I have yet to see any radio system that provided the consistency and reliability of wired communication."

Not to mention best pings, bandwidth. I hope wired/fibered lasts forever. Glad we moved away from using coax though.

Then there is the whole, "hey, let's keep ambient RF/UHF/uWave bands quiet as possible" just for the hell of it and since everything else is likely to work better when not being soaked in broadband em fields.

 

RE: Tony thanks!, posted on May 9, 2015 at 12:28:18
Tony Lauck
Audiophile

Posts: 13629
Location: Vermont
Joined: November 12, 2007
 "Then there is the whole, "hey, let's keep ambient RF/UHF/uWave bands quiet as possible" just for the hell of it and since everything else is likely to work better when not being soaked in broadband em fields."

IMO, all government wireless spectrum allocations should sunset fairly quickly. Thereafter all frequency bands should be open for free uss by everyone, subject to spectral power density requirements at property boundaries. In otherwise, allocated like wi-fi. There is no valid engineering or economic excuse for continuing inefficient use of spectrum according to the limitations of 1940's radio technology. Spectrum is not scarce according to the laws of physics. Spectrum is scare due to politics.

Not going to happen soon. Entrenched monopolies own the government.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

 

Some excellent points you made., posted on May 9, 2015 at 13:16:21
Ugly
Audiophile

Posts: 2912
Location: Des Moines, WA
Joined: August 22, 2006
 but I think the problem is worse than that as the government continues to grow in size and gain power the effect will only get more severe with time.

 

Ethernet alternative, posted on May 16, 2015 at 12:27:24
Serge_S
Audiophile

Posts: 112
Location: NYS
Joined: March 13, 2012
 When TASCAM da-6400 becomes available you should be able to CAT5 into it directly from your PC via AVB or DANTE networking and use it as Ethernet DAC.

 

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