Computer Audio Asylum

Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

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RE: Cable effects same regardless of USB mode

Posted by John Swenson on November 30, 2009 at 15:47:48:
The problem is ground noise coupling between boards (or "independant" sections on the same board). It is possible to setup the grounding schemes to minimize this, albeit not very easy. The easiest way to get around this is to use non electrical connections between sections such as optical, but these generate their own jitter.

I tried this a couple years ago with three boards running completely separate power supplies with grounding schemes designed to minimize ground coupling between boards BUT things like the length of the USB cable STILL affected the sound! It was true that the resulting sound was extremely good, but maybe because of that the USB input differences seemed even greater.

BTW this was a very expensive DAC to make it was close to $3K just in parts, not counting the case with multiple separate shielded compartments etc. Something is still leaking through even when we do our best to stomp it out. I've come to the conclusion that we still don't really know the root cause. The stuff I talked about was stuff we know about, but there has got to be something else going on.

John S.