Home General Asylum

General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories.

Re: Magnetic/hard-drive vs. optical/CD: Who has made the switch?

You may want to PM John Swenson. He has experimented as much as anyone who has been posting comments/results/feedback on this subject. Of his experiments, apparently the optimal current design for a said DAC IC (that can accept I2S) is: PC=>USB cable=>USB Controller=>I2S=>Dac Chip; completely eliminating spdif. The latter three stages are inside the DAC chassis. It was his initial design (the pcm2706/7 USB interface) that was implemented by Klaus for his tda1543 Dac (and latter by Brent) on the diyhifi.org thread to which you referred in your recent 6moons commentary. A search on the PC Audio forum using keyword "USB" and John's name will yield 70 posts on the USB interface. I've read that Philips engineers ended up implementing spdif out of convenience rather than for its technical merit. This is not to say that one cannot achieve great results with USB=>SPDIF=>Favorite DAC as Pedja's experiments demonstrate that there can be more volatility in performance due to differences between two tda1543 chips, than from switching from spdif to I2S. However, USB=>I2S now seems very promosing for those who like nonos dac's using the tda1543 and tda1541 chips (or any DAC chip that accepts I2S for that matter) both in terms of quality and convenience.


This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Parts Connexion  


Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups


You can not post to an archived thread.