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In Reply to: RE: But does the BUFFALO chip upsample as well? posted by rickmcinnis@dogwoodfabrics.com on May 29, 2009 at 19:53:32
Rick,yes, I've had this confirmed by the designers of the Buffalo32S, the oversampling FIR filter is also clearly mentioned in the data sheet (although they don't really disclose how the upsampling is done and to which frequency), the ESS9018 chip has what they call the Time Domain Jitter Eliminator which basically is upsampling and reclocking, as with your Burr Brown a technique that is commonly used. The ESS9018 is highly praised for exactly this feature, it is said to be very efficient and to do things very well, but I agree with you, I have yet to hear a solution where a hardware upsampler does a better job (or at least not worse) than a software upsampler like SRC or SoX.
And yes, the chip is designed with the ability of turning this feature off, it requires setting a few registers via i2c, but the firmware used by the Buffalo32S designers does not offer that functionality, you need a custom firmware for that. Surely the Buffalos are a very fine piece of audio design and manufacture, but I believe the chip can do even better. Since like you I do not want the DAC to do the upsampling, plus I do not think that our cMP2 environment produces too much jitter anymore that needs attenuating (the measurements cics had done in March last year were already impressive, and so much improvements have been made since then), I will build my own DAC later this year with two ESS9018 chips in dual mono configuration (recommended by ESS for best audiophile performance) and compare - at least that's the plan ;-)
Best,
Robert
Edits: 05/30/09 05/31/09Follow Ups:
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