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It does depend on what you are doing.

Posted by Gordon Rankin (M) on January 22, 2007 at 08:50:49

In Reply to: USB DACs --- yeah or neah? posted by VeeJay on January 21, 2007 at 13:26:40:

Veejay,

Basically there is allot going on here as far as highend and most of it is pretty new. My first USB DAC was 4 years ago and the newer version of that one is much better.

I did respond to your stuff at the Stereophile site.

But just a few things... USB is capable with Full Speed (12MHZ) of only 24/96. If you do the design correctly this will work for any data upto 24 bits and sampling rates that you enumerate for. Enumeration is the initialization of the USB device. You can tell the computer what it is that you support (i.e. 16/44.1 or 16 bits at 32, 44.1, 48 what ever).

The problem with most USB High End is that they are just converting to SPDIF and then doing the same old thing.

It is really best not to do this but to take the USB stream and convert it to a logical output to the dac and or filter if you are into that stuff.

There are also different USB devices many of which are plagued with a couple of issues. The first series of devices had terrible jitter. The second generation where much better but included dacs that interferred with the clocks and also shared the clock between the USB and the AUDIO. Well 12MHZ doesn't really go into the audio clocks easily (i.e. 11.2896MHZ, 24.576MHZ etc...).

So what's best to do is engineer around these problems or use what I am calling the 3rd generation parts which require custom programming and the clocking problems go away but then their are software issues to face.

The biggest problem we are all faced with in High End is the fact that the accountants at these semiconductor companies feel we aren't enough buisness and therefore they cater to the high volume companies who make pretty low end units.

The good fact is that with each day we are excelling at a higher rate. Let's face it... having all those error free ripped cd's on a hard drive is much better than any CD player or transport ever would be and at a significant savings in $.

Thanks
Gordon

J. Gordon Rankin

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