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In Reply to: Re: As requested... posted by Mike Rubin on March 23, 2007 at 21:10:42:
It makes sense though... since the signal needs to be converted and routed though extra signal paths when you use USB.I have just tried switching back and forth between coax/RCA and toslink... and I can tell you there is a difference. Toslink sounds more mellow and laid back... Not only did I notice this, but my girl did as well as I was switching between the two.
I don't know how USB would sound... right now I am digging the toslink though. I am sure that a USB dac would still sound a hell of a lot better than any one built into a sound card.
Follow Ups:
The CD transport converts I2S to SPDIF, which is then converted back to I2S inside the DAC. A USB DAC takes the signal from the computer and converts it to SPDIF then the DAC converts it to I2S. The only difference is where the SPDIF conversion takes place, in the transport or in the DAC. Some USB dacs convert USB to I2S directly, and some people claim that is the best way.The technical advantages of using a hard drive system as a digital transport far outweigh any potential disadvantage of converting USB to SPDIF. I think that with a good USB cable and a computer with enough memory and properly implemented (even an old laptop with an external drive would suffice), you can get far more bang for your buck with a computer as transport setup.
Just my 2 cents.
-Aaron.
I am back using the soundcard's Digital IO, but this time I am using a winamp ASIO plugin to bypass the windows mixers.Basically, the external USB optical thing worked, but it would go dark when a song was not playing and it would give my DAC problems from that. The soundcard's IO module stays lit always and so there are no problems with that, and with bypassing the mixers using ASIO the sound is much improved.
I am now using a USB direct to optical adapter to eliminate the noise and problems associated with using the output of a soundcard (even digital)I am using one originally designed for quality digital recording from a PC so it really does sound great with a low noise floor. The sound is even better than it was from my sound card.
It is still optical and it still sounds "un-digital", but just with even better dynamic range. I think if you are going to use a PC, the best thing to do is to find a way to bypass the internal soundcard's mixer.
I think I would recommend the USB MHDT dac even though I have not heard it, the advanatage is that it's USB bypasses the internal soundcard so that it probably would sound better with the "inferior" USB link than with a soundcard and good toslink/RCA link.
I used to think that digital was digital, but when I began to use the digital out on my soundcard, I noticed right away that it was not using a direct to digital signal... that it was still being routed through the mixer and mixed in with the rest of the windows sounds. Also, to get a good line level, you had to turn the windows mixer volume controls up high, which degrades the sound further (raising the noise floor).
It is interesting to me that you prefer TOSLink. It's all I ever have used, simply because I had the cables already, but I keep hearing that coax is the better way to go. Decent coax cables are cheap enough, though, that I should do a comparison myself.
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