What's the best DAC digital interface possible?
- Thread starter Blizzard
- Start date
Since I'm working on developing products, I'm looking at things from another angle. I'm looking for the best ways to do things. I know that the Lampi GG is a great DAC, but I also know it would be much better if they had a better interface option than the Amanero. The reason Lukasz use the Amanero is because he's not a chip programmer. It's tons of work building an interface and all the drivers that are required. Very few DAC manufacturers build their own digital interfaces from scratch. Resonessence is one of the very few, but they are chip manufacturers. The Mirus was designed and built at ESS where they design the DAC chips. So they have the knowledge, resources and manpower at their disposal. But the great thing about Lukasz using the Amanero is, it can very easily be swapped out with a turn key Ethernet renderer board. Q1 2016 some very attractive OEM boards are gonna hit the market. Once Lukasz gets his hands on one, I can assure you the Amanero will bite the dust.
ST fiber is perfect then. It offers complete isolation from noise, and no jitter is introduced because the clock is sent over a different connection.
A similar technique was used about thirty years ago - Sony and Krell had separate CD transport and DACs having the clock close to the DAC, sending it back to the transport by a separate ST channel.
It is the only really usable advice. People can have their own rankings of how it should ideally be, but IMHO currently what counts mostly is the implementation for a particular system. As I do not have the time or conditions to try everything I will let the ears of people with longtime reported public experience decide for me ...
From a consumer perspective that's the best you can do. But it still pays to be aware of the best ways to do things. It blows my mind how many people use USB connections when theres superior interface options on the same DAC. Perfect example is the PS Audio Directstream.
Paul McGowan himself said:
"On a pure sound basis and without regard for available sources that can do more than stream CD quality, Glass is the best, followed by HDMI, XLR and RCA. USB falls lowest on the list just from this single standpoint because of noise issues."
This is of course for interfacing to external transports. The bridge (their internal Ethernet renderer) is the very best option. Yet so many people insist on using the USB port just because some salesman convinced them that if they place a trinket in the signal path, wonderful things will happen.
that is just not true, at least in my part of the dac market. your 'anti-Regen' centric world is a bit skewed.
I don't know of anyone that choose USB so they use a Regen or similar product. the Regen is just a tweak that some try to improve the sound of their USB connection.
USB intentions came first, the Regen after for some.
maybe a cheap dac was purchased somewhere so they could use a Regen with a USB, but personally I've never heard of it going that way.
Well the REGEN just came out in May. So I suppose that wasn't the case for folks who bought DAC's before then. But I do know of guys with Directstream's who have tons of money into their USB system (1 or 2 REGEN's, LPS's to power them, fancy cable, clock mods to the REGEN etc), and simply haven't even bothered trying any of the other interface options.
USB for audio was created as an easy way to interface general purpose computers to DAC's. People use USB for this reason. But once you get into spending thousands of dollars, there's simply better ways to do things. Even the $550 QA660 SD card transport sounds better than anything that has a USB port on it, regardless of price.
I would not agree with him on HDMI in a million years. With HDMI, the audio is slaved to video. Even if you play music only sources, the player manufacturers video to embed the audio in blanking interval. This then lights up a million circuits in the player, making all but the best, best systems suffer.
Here is an AVR driven by HDMI and S/PDIF (thought async USB):
The graph in red is the HDMi distortion which you can see clearly is higher than async USB driving the same unit's S/PDIF interface.
It gets even worse. These are two identical HDMI measurements on this AVR:
As you can see, performance varies all the time!!!
In this extensive set of measurements I did, Async USB always came out first. And HDMI always dead last.
I would not agree with him on HDMI in a million years. With HDMI, the audio is slaved to video. Even if you play music only sources, the player manufacturers video to embed the audio in blanking interval. This then lights up a million circuits in the player, making all but the best, best systems suffer.
Here is an AVR driven by HDMI and S/PDIF (thought async USB):
The graph in red is the HDMi distortion which you can see clearly is higher than async USB driving the same unit's S/PDIF interface.
It gets even worse. These are two identical HDMI measurements on this AVR:
As you can see, performance varies all the time!!!
In this extensive set of measurements I did, Async USB always came out first. And HDMI always dead last.
What he meant is I2S LVDS over HDMI like they use. He was speaking more in layman terms intended for people who know the interface protocols based on the connectors.
However the new Bryston BDA-3 can extract DSD and PCM out of HDMI TMDS bitstreams. So it will be interesting to see how good their implementation is. I had a talk with Dustin Forman about that. And he said TMDS is actually superior to LVDS. Only problem is it's proprietary, and you must have a way of tranparently extracting out the data from the bitstream. Then you also have the HDCP copyright protection to deal with as well. But as a transmission protocol, it's very good.
If the guys over at Silicon Image decided to make an dedicated "optimized for high end audio version" it would be real good. But the problem is, the market just isn't big enough.
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I thought that is what he meant but he should not call it HDMI. He is just using HDMI connector and wiring, nothing else.
The only problem with external clocks are, the further the clock is from the DAC chip, the more jitter is introduced. So even if you have some crazy good clock, much is lost by the time it makes it to the DAC chip. Having a lower performing clock, but located within an inch or 2 from the DAC chip, can result in better real world jitter performance. The reason external clocks are popular in the pro world is to sync multiple devices together.
The latest "audio over IP" protocols such as Ravenna/Dante/AVB, takes this to another level with the grandmaster clocking scheme. This allows 1 clock in the system to be assigned the role of grandmaster. Then it just sends a PLL to the other clocks in the system. This PLL is only for sync purposes or "skew". Each device still gets to take advantage of the low jitter from it's own master clock inches from DAC chips, or what ever else is in the system that needs to be synced.
Hi Guys,
I've been posting some feedback on a few SD card transports on a few other thread. So I thought this would be a better place. There's one transport in particular that's really sparked my interest, and should spark everyone's who is on a quest for best sound. But it only comes on a raw PCB. So you can just have the raw PCB sitting on your audio rack, or you can build it into an enclosure. You also need a 5V power supply. The better the supply, the better the sound. It supports up to 24/384 PCM and DSD 256. From what I hear it's one of the best sounding external transport's money can buy. Best of all it's only $495 plus cost of supply, and case if you want one. It has both I2S/DSD over LVDS and CMOS HDMI output, as well is BNC/Coaxial SPDIF. The HDMI is of course the best option, but I hear the SPDIF is also awesome.
They make it in limited runs, so you need to order fast while they are available. They are on lot 6 now. There has been several revisions over the years, and this latest one is the best yet.
Here it is:
http://www.tachyon.co.jp/~sichoya/SDTrans/SDTrans6.html
I found a guy who builds a case kit for it as well that looks very nice.
http://tec-asai.com/tec-asai_home/xdiary/sdtrans384_os49-32-43bb.html
I suggest using google translate if you can't read Japanese.
There's quite a bit of info on it if you google it. Here's a recent thread about a guy who is using one with his Devialet. And he's only using the SPDIF output!
http://devialetchat.com/showthread.php?tid=935
Yes it's missing all the fancy GUI bells and whistles, but it's still better than using a CD player with CD's.
Anyone looking for an $495 transport that will put standalone server/renderers such as the $17000 Aurender W20 to shame should take this product very seriously.
And for those who want to take it even further, Acko built an high end reclocker (AKL S03) that's compatible with it. It uses crazy good clocks and will take this transport into world class audio territory rivalling the best of the best.
https://sites.google.com/site/ackodac/home
Here's a video of the raw board in action.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCRd1BN6zEc
I've been posting some feedback on a few SD card transports on a few other thread. So I thought this would be a better place. There's one transport in particular that's really sparked my interest, and should spark everyone's who is on a quest for best sound. But it only comes on a raw PCB. So you can just have the raw PCB sitting on your audio rack, or you can build it into an enclosure. You also need a 5V power supply. The better the supply, the better the sound. It supports up to 24/384 PCM and DSD 256. From what I hear it's one of the best sounding external transport's money can buy. Best of all it's only $495 plus cost of supply, and case if you want one. It has both I2S/DSD over LVDS and CMOS HDMI output, as well is BNC/Coaxial SPDIF. The HDMI is of course the best option, but I hear the SPDIF is also awesome.
They make it in limited runs, so you need to order fast while they are available. They are on lot 6 now. There has been several revisions over the years, and this latest one is the best yet.
Here it is:
http://www.tachyon.co.jp/~sichoya/SDTrans/SDTrans6.html
I found a guy who builds a case kit for it as well that looks very nice.
http://tec-asai.com/tec-asai_home/xdiary/sdtrans384_os49-32-43bb.html
I suggest using google translate if you can't read Japanese.
There's quite a bit of info on it if you google it. Here's a recent thread about a guy who is using one with his Devialet. And he's only using the SPDIF output!
http://devialetchat.com/showthread.php?tid=935
Yes it's missing all the fancy GUI bells and whistles, but it's still better than using a CD player with CD's.
Anyone looking for an $495 transport that will put standalone server/renderers such as the $17000 Aurender W20 to shame should take this product very seriously.
And for those who want to take it even further, Acko built an high end reclocker (AKL S03) that's compatible with it. It uses crazy good clocks and will take this transport into world class audio territory rivalling the best of the best.
https://sites.google.com/site/ackodac/home
Here's a video of the raw board in action.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCRd1BN6zEc
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very interesting, I have not had much time to explore, but it seems that: The only file format for PCM is WAV (not enough computing power even to convert flac etc.) and all files have to be stored on SDHC cards.
Yes I know. Wav just like a CD. So all PCM would need to be decompressed to WAV, but DSD works as is. Small price to pay for sound quality this good. It's still much less of a pain than CD players, Vinyl or R2R tape.
Bruce B
WBF Founding Member, Pro Audio Production Member
Correct... I have never used an external clock that made the converter sound better. If it does, either the unit is broken or the manufacturer didn't know how to implement it correctly. Internal clocks have always sounded better.
Now... here's the caveat. If you are in a studio and are using "multiple" converters, you DO need a master or central clock to get them all to play nice. Here's where the external clock does make the individual converters sound better.
So how do you manage an 8TB library with the loimited interface? is it that you have to resort to playlists?
If USB is so bad then I wonder why the latest and greatest DAC's recently brought to the market seem to focus on using the USB interface if one wants to play the highest quality/bit rate music files from said DAC? If one chooses to use an SPDIF input on these units they usually only getting 24/192 as an option for playback.
All the talk about noisy USB makes me wonder what people are using as a music server in these situations. Even if the DAC doesn't use galvanic isolation its still possible to achieve a clean, low noise connection between the two devices over USB as long as the music server is a low powered/lightweight unit.
I'm using a small Alix server running Voyage Linux that I built and it only requires about 13v DC @.23amps to run which is equal to about 3 watts (going by memory on exact figures but you get the idea). In this configuration the grunge level and noise traveling down the USB pipe is almost non existent. I can stream up to DSD128 over DOP via USB to my Meitner DAC with this little server with zero issues and the Meitner has no isolation on the USB Input from what I'm told. There is no noise to these ears.
All the talk about noisy USB makes me wonder what people are using as a music server in these situations. Even if the DAC doesn't use galvanic isolation its still possible to achieve a clean, low noise connection between the two devices over USB as long as the music server is a low powered/lightweight unit.
I'm using a small Alix server running Voyage Linux that I built and it only requires about 13v DC @.23amps to run which is equal to about 3 watts (going by memory on exact figures but you get the idea). In this configuration the grunge level and noise traveling down the USB pipe is almost non existent. I can stream up to DSD128 over DOP via USB to my Meitner DAC with this little server with zero issues and the Meitner has no isolation on the USB Input from what I'm told. There is no noise to these ears.
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