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In Reply to: RE: It seems that USB has become very popular with posted by fmak on August 07, 2012 at 14:26:51
When it comes time for me to update the firmware on my Mytek I will have to get a Firewire adapter for about $35 and plug it into the PCI-E slot in my computer. At that point I will try the Firewire connection to the Mytek and see if it sounds better. At present, however, I am told that direct DSD operation only works over the USB interface. I would rather not have both connections plugged in at the same time, as it is trolling for EMI/RFI.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Follow Ups:
you will realise how imporatnt the usb and firewire cables can be.
Should these cables seriously matter it will speak ill of my DAC. Both USB and Firewire are packet interfaces and as used with the Mytek are not clocking the audio samples. In other words, these cables are not in the audio signal path in any way shape or form. If there is a difference it will be due to ground pollution or other secondary effects.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
.
If a change in cables makes your DAC sound seriously better would you refuse to use it just because in your opinion it should not have mattered?
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theorising desn't work in high quality audio reproduction.
"if you start with the conviction that cables don't matter and not allow yourself to try them out, then you will never get the best balance of components in your system."
Oh yea?
Well, from my very own experience I know that you are right about cables and in hindsight I wish I had payed more attention to them decades before I did. It's tough safely assigning "don't care" status to audio things but there are infinitely many things and we only have a finite life.
But where do you draw the line? My current solution is to read AA. One person, say Enid L. may simply be a nut case but if dozens of listeners find massaging their speaker cables with olive oil or somesuch helps the sound, well...
Regards, Rick
Some here go on and on about clocking and dacs. Yet with every high quality dac and sound card I have used (quite a few), even the clock cable and impedance matching affect SQ significantly.
As dCS suggested years ago in their manuals, don't always clock as per theory and sometimes recovered clocks can sound better than transmitted clocks.
In other words, cabling and clocking arranagements for a particular hardware set should be to listening and enjoyment purposes and not on the basis of whether transports should be clocked to the device or to a word clock. It may be that are cancelling or additive effects going on but theorising and not trying is no help at all to get better SQ.
Obviously, if the Firewire connection works better than the USB connection I will use that where possible. There are also differences in the many ways the Mytek Stereo192-DSD DAC can be set up and I will explore the new combinations, which include various clock modes, driver and application buffering settings, etc.. The level display can be switched on/off, there are filter choices, there are analog and digital gain control options, etc. If a particular interface is sensitive to digital cable my tendency will be to avoid that interface, just as I did 20 years ago when I discovered (to my amazement) that the optical ST interface in my two box Proceed CD player sounded worse than the coax.
Tweaking the computer and digital cable is a poor substitute for a better DAC, as the need to do so indicates that the sound could have been better if the DAC had been better designed or built. Hence my comment that if the differences I heard were significant I would consider getting a better DAC. It is also possible that any differences I might hear would be due to interference with my powered speakers or their cabling, hence the need for experimentation to isolate this possibility. One has to understand the root cause of a problem if one wants to make the largest possible improvement. Operating incrementally on a "cut and try" basis without proper instrumentation and theoretical understanding can be an immense waste of time, something I learned over 50 years ago when tweaking a Dynaco amplifier. (This is particularly true when the differences are marginal, i.e. cannot be heard 100% of the time when doing blind tests, as the psycho-acoustic noise turns the search process into a random walk.)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
that you are just starting on a journey that some of us started 10 years and more back with digital audio in its many forms. We have learnt to keep open minds simply because cause and effect cannot be established with proper theoretical understanding in some matters in audio.
I have the equipment to measure, the theoretical knowledge in acoustics, measurement and control, and the interest to pursue the hobby of audio, and have done those things that you talk about with many high end dacs, players and computers. I therefore have felt it unnecessary to answer the kinds of questions you pose to which there are no real answers.
I have come to the firm conclusion that the kind of conviction that you promote as the starting point is pretty useless in terms of getting the best sound from a system. A simple example is cabling for which we can speculate on cause and effect, but that is all. Some talk about metallurgy, others dielectric, others geometry but if you start with the conviction that cables don't matter and not allow yourself to try them out, then you will never get the best balance of components in your system.
Note: I posted this in response but soemhow the text apeared in response to my own post as can be seen below.
"It seems that you are just starting on a journey that some of us started 10 years and more back with digital audio in its many forms."
Are you talking about me? I think you might have misplaced this post. (I have over 40 years experience with high quality audio and over 30 years with digital audio.)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
"theorising desn't work in high quality audio reproduction."
But apparently, uninformed guessing and speculating does? ;-)
... you are much more appropriate - by far - person to answer that question.Like, for instance, when you convince yourself that something (USB cables) doesn't matter to sound quality, and then start guessing/speculating as to what theoretical basis could be behind that "sameness"...
Edits: 08/09/12
as being irrelevent to audio
that you are just starting on a journey that some of us started 10 years and more back with digital audio in its many forms. We have learnt to keep open minds simply because cause and effect cannot be established with proper theoretical understanding in some matters in audio.
I have the equipment to measure, the theoretical knowledge in acoustics, measurement and control, and the interest to pursue the hobby of audio, and have done those things that you talk about with many high end dacs, players and computers. I therefore have felt it unnecessary to answer the kinds of questions you pose to which there are no real answers.
I have come to the firm conclusion that the kind of conviction that you promote as the starting point is pretty useless in terms of getting the best sound from a system. A simple example is cabling for which we can speculate on cause and effect, but that is all. Some talk about metallurgy, others dielectric, others geometry but if you start with the conviction that cables don't matter and not allow yourself to try them out, then you will never get the best balance of components in your system.
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