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Thanks for the insight!

Posted by Tuckers (M) on November 16, 2004 at 00:25:51

In Reply to: USB audio, TAS1020, digital filters, jitter etc. posted by John Swenson on November 15, 2004 at 21:08:06:

Kudos to you for your research and response. And thanks to Thomas and dburna for their insight.

I really like NONOS DACs, but I have to agree, I think the problem with standard DACs probably lies with the implementations of digital filters.

In the VRS, we tried every type of software oversampling and upsampling, and we always preferred the sound without. The music always sounded slightly more etched and mechanical using them. While the VRS does not use a NOS Dac, we reduce any resampling of the signal we can.

IMHO, if you can stay away from SPDIF interfaces of any kind, you better serve the music. SPDIF really changes the sound of music for the worse. In fact many CD players use SPDIF internally and it is one of the causes of CD sound. The fact that the USB DACs that are out there now also use SPDIF is why we don't currently recommend them.

Ethernet as a transport mechanism is flawless, if you are moving whole files. The minute you begin to use it to stream files, the data becomes susceptible to timing errors. However, the Ethernet streaming devices that we have heard are markedly better than SPDIF devices in sonics, and we theorize that less jitter is generated. However, some Ethernet streaming devices use SPDIF in the path, and they generally sound worse (two sources of jitter?).

The bottom line in our theory is that anytime you stream music data to a device, be it USB, SPDIF (internally or externally) or Ethernet, you compromise the signal integrity. That is why our systems are built around analog outputs for most customers. The only way to transport music data cleanly is with a master clock sync, as the professional world does (and our digital outs do), but consumer DACs rarely offer this.

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