Will a music streamer help me?

Ron Resnick

Site Co-Owner, Administrator
Jan 24, 2015
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Beverly Hills, CA
USB is an asynchronous protocol with some non trivial technical particularities, it is very different from SPDIF or AES/EBU signals, ambiguous analogies or references to jitter or clocking are just oversimplifying or misleading marketing.

Thank you, but not a bit illuminating.

Why not just put a re-clocker between an iPad streaming Qobuz and a DAC to improve sound quality?
 

microstrip

VIP/Donor
May 30, 2010
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Portugal
Thank you, but not a bit illuminating.

Why not just put a re-clocker between an iPad streaming Qobuz and a DAC to improve sound quality?

The idea of buffering digital data and re-clocking it to erase its past history is not new - it was done since the early CD players. However, as debated in the Taiko Audio forum, the task is much more complex than it suggests - noise is buried in the physical analog electrical representation of the digital signals and affects the final sound quality of streaming in ways that are not well understood. As far as I know, no box to be put in serial with the USB line achieved the sound quality of the best top streamers.

Remember that this is an hobby of preferences and diversity - some people add exotic ultra low noise phase external clocks to their DACs and love them, some others reported that they make systems sound ultra detailed and clinical sounding.
 

Ron Resnick

Site Co-Owner, Administrator
Jan 24, 2015
16,017
13,347
2,665
Beverly Hills, CA
The idea of buffering digital data and re-clocking it to erase its past history is not new - it was done since the early CD players. However, as debated in the Taiko Audio forum, the task is much more complex than it suggests - noise is buried in the physical analog electrical representation of the digital signals and affects the final sound quality of streaming in ways that are not well understood. As far as I know, no box to be put in serial with the USB line achieved the sound quality of the best top streamers.

Remember that this is an hobby of preferences and diversity - some people add exotic ultra low noise phase external clocks to their DACs and love them, some others reported that they make systems sound ultra detailed and clinical sounding.

That is helpful. Thank you!
 

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