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In Reply to: True that some things affect SQ more. posted by Sordidman on October 22, 2014 at 14:21:39:
When the team at Esoteric/TEAC thought that they'd try to see and see what happens when they used a much more precise, beefy, and overkill motor: and a magnesium disc clamping mechanism, - they probably weren't sure if it would improve SQ. And certainly that transport wouldn't sound as good if it had a crappy power supply, or the DAC that one used it with was not very good either.
When one moves up into the category of superior playback, removing unnecessary, (and sometimes what appears to be minutiae), components, can yield (however slight), positive results.
With a design like the VRDS-NEO, I usually wonder whether the engineering team developed an optimum design through experimentation, data gathering, and analysis. Or did they simply try to make it as perfect as they knew how, hoping that it would improve things. The latter approach seems to be common in high end audio, and it usually does yield improvements, but often we can't pin down the specific design decisions that are most responsible for improvement.Do you think that a Rasberry Pi and the "slightly custom" board that the Bryston uses would sound the same in the same the case, with the same PSU?
Would the Aries sound the same as the Rasberry Pi running off of it's USB outs?
That's the $100000 question. A problem with computer audio is that there are so many variables. You can optimize all kinds of things only to be let down by a grounding issue or one bad component choice.
From what I can tell based on their designs & the component selections visible in pictures, I would expect the Aries to be superior via USB output except in environments with a lot of RFI, in which case the Bryston might be superior. Regarding replacing the mainboard in the Bryston with a Raspberry Pi, I couldn't guess which would be better via USB output, but I'm certain they would have to cut the feature set if they used a Raspberry Pi. Via SPDIF or AES/EBU, it's really not obvious whether the Bryston or Aries would be better, but they have both spent effort trying to improve these outputs relative to what you would get from a typical sound card.
I am assuming that the differences in SQ between these transports are not due to different data being transmitted, or differences in data rate, or errors in transmission of the data. Restated another way, the hypothesis is that all three transports are equivalently functional as data interfaces.
A USB 2.0 cable contains 4 wires: +5V DC, ground, D+, and D-. The data is transmitted as a differential signal on D+/-.
Of these, the ground is probably most important to SQ. The Raspberry Pi is designed to have a floating ground, and from the pictures of the Aries I believe it is too. So no ground loops, but also no low impedance path out of the circuit for RFI. The Bryston, on the other hand, appears to be grounded to the mains equipment ground. Which is better will be system dependent.
Assuming that you're not powering the DAC via USB, the +5V DC output probably has the least impact on SQ because it will only be used by the transport to signal its presence to the DAC, and the DAC may not require it and might even leave it unconnected. The Aries has a dedicated regulator right next to the USB output, the Bryston has a modular MeanWell supply located on a separate power supply board providing +5V to the mainboard, and the Raspberry Pi also has a +5V input. From a design POV, I guess I would give the edge to Aries here because the dedicated regulator would isolate the +5V USB output from anything else on the board using +5V. But I doubt it makes much difference at all with most DACs.
The D+/D- signal lines could be important, and some of the things that might make a difference are clock stability, bandwidth (sharpness of edge transitions), noise, and possibly DC offset if these lines aren't transformer coupled at the receive end. In this case, I would expect the Aries to have an advantage because it has a dedicated high quality clock for the USB output right next to the controller and it looks like the outputs from the USB controller are buffered by line drivers. The Bryston is just using the USB outputs provided by the mainboard and same for the Raspberry Pi; I couldn't guess as to the quality of these.
Of course, all of this is conjecture. The Aries looks to be well designed for the purpose, but all it takes is one bad design decision or component choice to spoil the sound quality.
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Follow Ups
- RE: True that some things affect SQ more. - Dave_K 09:08:25 10/23/14 (0)
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