Great little hub to put in front of a USB dac

I installed one of these yesterday, and it made a pretty marked improvement for not very much money. It's basically an audiophile quality hub built around a great clock and power supply. It's purpose in life is to improve the quality of what your USB input is seeing.

http://uptoneaudio.com/products/usb-regen
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f...tone-audio-regen-listening-impressions-24078/

I was using a high quality purpose built server, with a tricked out USB output board, feeding a high quality asynch USB to Spdif (actually, USB to Tascam) converter, so I was surprised by the magnitude of the gain. I noticed markedly better imaging, with a bigger soundstage, more "air" and more three dimensional imaging. I also noticed improved clarity and bite on pianos (better "clang") and stringed instruments (akin to more rosin on the bows). All in a lot for under $200 with shipping.

I haven't gotten my MSB Signature V quad rate i2s unit back yet (it's in for the IV to V upgrade), so it'll be interesting to see if I get the same magnitude of improvement.

I have no financial interest, etc. in the vendors and no prior history with them.

It was a Tascam pinout/format feeding a Trinnov.

Given that the Regen unit was directly feeding an asynch USB device with an ultra high quality power supply and Hynes USB 5v regulator, I was surprised it made any difference. It should not have made much of a difference, but it did. (I also have a Schiit, and it didn't make any difference in that same signal chain.)

Here are two explanations by the engineer behind the product; there's some solid reasoning for why bits-are-bits isn't true in practice at our dac's USB interfaces:

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f10-music-servers/uptone-audio-regen-22803/index20.html#post418669
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f10-music-servers/uptone-audio-regen-22803/index16.html#post417237