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In Reply to: RE: Let the grenade throwing begin... posted by Romanesq on February 05, 2009 at 08:41:52
Optical out (TosLink) provides great isolation from the RFI of the computer. (You will still want to put a power line filter on the computer to keep the RFI from its switching power supply out of the rest of your system.)
The problem with TosLink is that it is S/PDIF, which inherently adds jitter. The faster the rise time of the data link, the less jitter gets added. TosLink is pretty slow and the rise times are slow enough that it can barely handle the data rates for S/PDIF. So there is more jitter added than with a coaxial cable. Therefore TosLink is better than coax in one way and worse in another.
The end result will depend on how well your external DAC rejects jitter. Unfortunately there is no such thing as an S/PDIF DAC that completely rejects jitter, except for the Chord. It has a big buffer and it takes 4 seconds after you hit play before you hear music.
Follow Ups:
Actually with the Playback Designs 2 dimensional DAC, the connection itself is irrelevant. Since the Playback Designs is immune to jitter, it does not matter whether you use Toslink, USB, SPDIF, AES, etc.
So you are saying that the DAC sounds the same with any transport, regardless of quality?
And that it sounds the same with any disc treatment (eg, Bedini Clarifier, Marigo mat, cleaning solutions, et cetera)?
That's pretty incredible!
By the way, the weblink you posted was indecipherable. Could you kindly explain how this thing works in plain English?
Yes Charles, that is exactly what I am saying. To prove our point, at THE Show we used a Sony Discman, which generates an immense amount of jitter into the DAC section of our player and compared it head to head with the Esoteric drive mechanism that is built into our player and there was no sonic difference. We had the same exact results running from a computer using a Lynx AES16 sound card via AES cables into our DAC.
I cannot speak of disc treatments as I have not experimented with them. However, we believe that as long as the bits get to our DAC intact, nothing else really matters.
I think the explanation was pretty clear and I thought it was in English :) Although I cannot give you our proprietary recipe, but I will try a different way.
Imagine you are on a freeway going to a predetermined destination and there is another car which needs to arrive there as well at the same time. You are both in the fast lane and the other car is in front of you. As they speed up and slow down, it causes you to do the same until you both arrive at the destination. This is essentially what a PLL is.
With our 2 dimensional DAC we use a technology we call the Playback Designs Frequency Arrival System (PDFAS). This technology eliminates the need for PLLs and all we care about is that both cars arrive to the destination at the same time. We no longer care how they get there.
And in every case it was nothing but wishful thinking - in resolving system, differences between transports, interconnects etc. were clearly audible.
Chord DAC64 is one of the examples of supposed - and clearly bogus - jitter immunity.
I assure you that it was not only my ears listening at THE Show, but everyone who attended heard the same thing. There was no sonic difference regardless of the transport.
"I assure you that it was not only my ears listening at THE Show, but everyone who attended heard the same thing."
I'm sure he's heard that one before too.
It is okay to be skeptical. Being obnoxious or sarcastic is just impolite.
Edits: 02/06/09
When real-world, understandable explanations of a technology are not forthcoming, you are asking for trouble. Maybe Andreas has come up with something that will revolutionize digital playback. But if all of the explanations are wrapped in mumbo-jumbo, it will soon be branded as snake oil.
This is not a recipe for success. Look at the people that came before and learn from their mistakes. At one time George Tice made a line of AC power conditioners that were considered to be the best available. His products were carried by the best dealers. He got great reviews from all the magazines.
Then he came out with this thing called "TPT" for "Tice Power Technology". It came in what appeared to be a $25 digital alarm clock from Radio Shack that he sold for $300 after "treating" it with the secret "TPT" juice. He refused to say how it worked except for some nonsense about "coherent electrons".
To make a long story short, within a few years he was literally out of business.
Nobody wants to buy snake oil. When Gordon developed his "asynchronous" USB technology, it was clearly the best way to get the data out of the computer and into your stereo system. We could have spent a bunch of time and money copying him, but guess what? At the end of the day, everyone would just say that Ayre copied Wavelength. And they would have been right. So we simply licensed it from him. It's a win-win for both companies.
If you look at the companies that are successful, they don't hide their technology == they brag about it. Go to the B&W website and learn *exactly* why they think their speaker is better than anybody else's. Learn about their diamond tweeter. Learn about their crossover design. Learn about their cabinet bracing. Learn about their woofer designs. B&W is the most successful high-end speaker company in the world. Put two and two together -- it's not a coincidence that they are successful *and* they tell all about their designs in great detail.
Then when somebody makes a woofer with carbon skins over a Rohacell (foam) core, guess what -- everyone knows that all they did was copy B&W. It doesn't hurt B&W's sales -- it *helps* their sales, by helping reinforce the fact that B&W is the technology leader.
So tell Andreas to explain in plain English what his new method is, and how it "eliminates" jitter. If it is great, we'll license it from him. And anybody that copies him will just be seen as copy cats. It won't hurt Playback, it will only enhance their reputation.
If you want to give someone advice doing it in a public forum is self serving and very obvious. If you are truly sincere, private emails show it better.
It appears obvious to me with each of your responses that you are just fishing. If we wanted to share our technology with you, we would have. You kept asking for me to explain what we are doing and I tried to do so in a way that everyone could get a basic understanding without giving away our trade secrets which certainly gives us a big market advantage. As far as licensing and our business goes, that really is our decision and not yours to dictate.
You stated:
"When Gordon developed his "asynchronous" USB technology, it was clearly the best way to get the data out of the computer and into your stereo system."
With all due respect to both you and Gordon, his asynchronous USB technology is NOT "the best" way to get data out of the computer and into your stereo system". It is just one way and as I stated before, our DAC does not care what interface is used, they are all going to sound the same.
Charles you are not being professional and while I have respect for you, I am losing it quickly.
Respectfully,
Jonathan Tinn
Playback Designs
Mr. Hansen has a solid history and a well earned reputation on this forum.
When I read his advice for you the last thing on my mind is that he was fishing for anything from you. I've never seen him operate that way.
On the other hand, you seem to be working overtime to generate snake oil suspicions out of the box. Your analogies of how your technology works haven't been particularly cogent and your responses to questions in this thread have been less than impressive.
It might be a good time to take a deep breath and restart your introduction from the beginning.
"It might be a good time to take a deep breath and restart your introduction from the beginning."
Way too late for that...
Just letting you know what it looks like from out here. It's yours to do with as you wish.
just a lurker here and mostly enjoying the read but Jonathan aren't you jumping into Charles' thread here and basically telling him his product is not going to be up to scratch, that he doesn't know about what he talks, all without a lot of detailed information about why .... start your own thread about your own white paper and I will happily read it. Sorry - just my grumpy 2 cents.
Hi David,
No, I do not believe so. This started with a statement that Charles made in:
http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/4/45406.html
All I said in response was:
"Actually with the Playback Designs 2 dimensional DAC, the connection itself is irrelevant. Since the Playback Designs is immune to jitter, it does not matter whether you use Toslink, USB, SPDIF, AES, etc."
I certainly was just trying to make it clear that I disagreed with his statement. His questions took it to where it is now. I never intended this.
Best Regards,
Jonathan Tinn
Playback Designs
You posted a link to a page that made product claims which read like snake oil. Many of us would like to have DACs that totally reject jitter and produce sound that does not depend on the transport. Such a DAC would greatly simplify computer audio. Manufacturers have made claims of this sort before, but these have not stood the test of actual performance, according to reports I have seen or equipment that I have used.
By describing how your product works using unusual terminology your product takes on a decided "snake oil" tinge. I have no way of knowing what your product does. My best guess is that you are doing some form of asynchronous resampling. But the way the web page is written it is impossible to tell. If you wrote how your product worked and compared it to other approaches then we might continue to doubt your claims, but at least you wouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
Your product may be good for all I know, but you definitely have a ways to go when it comes to marketing literature.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Jonathan,Two things with regard to jitter.
1) There is no such thing as zero. Even the intrinsic jitter of the dac chip you are using, the clocks and such can never approach zero. Nor is there anyway to test that.
2) We have been theorizing over jitter elimination systems and have come to realize that these act merely as filters. The more jitter that the system has the less the jitter reduction system can get out (be it upsampling, fifo whatever). To prove this we poured over recent Stereophile testing for jitter results with several dacs. There was always a increase in jitter from interface X over Y for all these dacs. Especially ones with USB using Adaptive mode. Well we also tested several dacs with our Wavecrest and Prism analyzer and came to the same conclusion.
I would assume since this dac only has a 16/48 capabilities that it is using off the shelf PCM29/270x type parts. We have seen upwards of 4300ps of jitter from these parts. The jitter spectrum also varies allot from PC to MAC and from computer to computer.
Therefore if you don't really know the destination, then how can you get there at the same time? A PLL is basically a filter, some better than others but it will change the sampling frequency to match the incoming signal which in a sense will inject jitter it self.
Thanks
Gordon
J. Gordon Rankin
Edits: 02/06/09
Hi Gordon,
First of all, our Playback Designs DAC can receive up to 24bits/192kHz in addition to raw DSD. It has a discrete architecture meaning that it is not based on any standard-off-the-shelf chip. But the core DAC is a separate issue from clock generation and digital input reception.
There are digital transmission formats that limit the amount of bits per sample and/or the sample rate. Not all formats (i.e AES, SPDIF, Toslink etc.) support the same combination of bits per sample and sample rate. Some implementations of USB audio transmissions have their limitations as well. This still has nothing to do with jitter.
There is no reason why the clock generation should be determined by the audio transmission format nor by the DAC. It needs to be looked at as a totally separate problem and the solution for that is probably the beauty of the Playback Designs system. Think about it, if your clock generation is so dependent on the digital audio input format how can you ever achieve any decent quality and safeguard it? It will always be at the mercy of whatever the user connects to the DAC and however he connects it, no matter how many sophisticated band-aids you put on.
By the way, the DAC is not the only component in the digital audio chain that contributes to the jitter budget of your system. It is the A/D converter too that was used in the recording process. That jitter from the A/D, however, is left in the digital audio as a permanent mark, which makes matters worse and more complicated for the DAC.
Regards,
Jonathan
Playback Designs
Jonathan,
"Some implementations of USB audio transmissions have their limitations as well. This still has nothing to do with jitter."
Why not?
I mean sure if you write device drivers and send it as block data then sure. But you are not doing that or you would not limit yourself to 16/48.
Therefore what your saying is only true in other people's devices and not yours. Because believe me the PCM or Cmedia parts are clearly made to mass marketed products and jitter was of little concern.
~~~~~~~~~~
We can't at all control the AD process. Well maybe soon as we maybe working on that also. But...
The discussion here is that you are claiming zero. Common... zero that's just silly. What is zero? how do we measure zero?
Pico Seconds, Phase noise what ever ... when you get better than 120dB phase noise at 10hz or better than say 1pS, that's still not zero.
Thanks
Gordon
J. Gordon Rankin
Uh. OK. Now it's perfectly clear...
Well I'm using an Intel Mac Mini (Core Solo) and it is connected to a PS Audio Premier so it is getting nice clean power instead of just filtering.
The Lavry DA10 it's coupled to does a fine job on jitter.
But this is a nice discussion started on the issue(s).
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