So, what I’ve gotten from reading this forum over the past year is that the equipment someone new to the hobby and not an ‘audiophile’ first buys is all that’s really needed. Not to necessarily equate quality with money (although that’s usually how it works), but one should buy the best amplification, DAC, and speakers that one can afford. All else is irrelevant to a greater or lesser degree.
Obviously that’s always been true, but to me it becomes more apparent that ‘audiophile’ cables, USB signal enhancers and fancy, super duper, extra special sauced endpoints are just a waste of money that should have been spent on real audio equipment.
Sorry, I’ve gone over to the other side. Once that leap is made all these inputs by the ‘costume jewelry’ manufacturers begin to sound like so much BS.
Yep, i have a couple of endpoints with that. Also have an SMS-200. But those are from ‘my salad days, when I was green in judgement’. No longer for me, if for you - great.
Currently, window shopping for my listening room and my last system to buy.
As it stands now SBC–>DAC–>amp–>speakers.
Was it Hegel or Woody Allen who counseled ‘Simplify, simplify’?
Great stuff Slim. I hope you didn’t sell the iUSB3.0 just yet! Once you settle on your DAC you just might find you’ll add it back in the chain. Keep an open mind and ears mate!
And don’t forget Room Treatments, if possible. If not, then room correction software can make a surprising difference. I would invest in that well before any interconnect upgrade.
All USB transmission is packetized. With the older isochronous transfer mode, you could theoretically buffer it and perhaps reduce dropouts with a man in the middle type device. With the current asynchronous transfer modes, there is no meaningful reclocking effect. I’m sure some people will insist otherwise…
Some of those devices might provide a meaningful benefit by isolating the power supply enviroments. How much (and if) that makes a difference depends on how good a job the DAC is doing isolating its USB port.
Yeah, room treatments are on my list. My potential listing room is only 10x15, so that’s a problem. Some examples of correction software that can be used with Roon, please. Do you mean HQPlayer?
Dirac and Acourate produced better results for me than REW in the end. Dirac currently requires that you pass the audio through their virtual sound card driver on Windows or Mac in order to apply the filtering, whereas Acourate generates a filter that can be loaded straight into Roon’s Convolution engine. This ends up being more convenient, so that’s the one that actually stuck for me.
The downside with Acourate is that the software is pretty technical to use (of course very powerful too, and good for more than just Room Correction if you’re an expert). It it’s not really the kind of thing you can just muddle through and get to the right place (and I am saying that as a professional-grade muddler). There is an eBook that walks you through step by step called “Accurate Sound Reproduction using DSP”. The first chunk of the book is pretty much an Acourate Room Correction tutorial. I recommend the book if you go down that road.
I 100% agree with the principles stated above. This discussion got into some really tiny details. Phase noise increasing with larger DSD rates has a dramatically smaller effect size than speakers, room treatments, room correction, amplifiers, etc. You should already have a very, very transparent system before stuff like that pops up to the top of the list.
When playing DSD, iDAC2 is “bit-perfect” with all filter settings. The filter selector only changes between two different analog filters in this case.
So far, it is quite the contrary what I’ve been measuring. Pretty systematically jitter is lower at higher sampling rates, especially at DSD, and highest with RedBook. This is partially due to how DSD works compared to PCM.
Thanks @jussi_laako, I thought this is straight forward mathematics…
lets say, you’re running the DAC at DSD64 using a base clock of 22.579MHz, the DAC now clock the data at every 2.822MHz pulses. Any expected timing error in the base clock is “divided” down approximately by 8x relatively to the sample rate. So the samples are positioned more accurately, thus, there is less jitter.
I hope so Henry, the sooner we can get rid of USB the happier I will be, it varies greatly in implementation and I think it does suck out some mid bass. I am currently looking carefully at any Ethernet to i2s devices that I can find but i2s was devised for carrying signals inside equipment cases and ultimately I hope we see more DACs with an Ethernet or Fibre input.
I think this is important. My Roon Ready ethernet input DAC (DirectStream) needs a lot of work on it’s ethernet input to better it’s USB input (fiber converters and a linear PSU on the most downstream converter) to my ears and in my system. I’ve been told by a couple of DAC designers that the ethernet physical interface can suffer some (not all) of the same/similar issues that the USB physical interface suffers.
At the same time there are a lot of DirectStream DAC owners using the Bridge 2 as is and prefer it over all of it’s other inputs - that’s where the YMMV caveat always comes in of course and I’m always mindful and very respectful of that.
Charles Hansen makes a Roon Ready DAC and he prefers the USB input too (he loves Roon like all us here do too). He also added some other comments in this thread:
Funnily enough, the DirectStream DAC’s network card and the card Ayre use are both made by ConversDigital. No doubt things will improve over the next couple of years (as happened with USB sources too).
Putting aside the convenience of ethernet and having the server in a different room etc and just looking at sound quality, I don’t think just seeing an ethernet input on a DAC and seeing the Roon Ready logo automatically means that is the best sounding input for that DAC.
It may be but it may not - it’s not an automatic given (yet).
