no measurements stated, in which case, who needs measurements anyway? I use my ears to determine if s product sounds better.
Go to: Alpha USB Series 2 — Berkeley Audio Design
and read the commentary on this device. Berkeley makes some very nice dacs and in their sales brief, they pretty much say that usb sucks unless you get this $2500 usb device. Why would a company do this?
Here are some comments on the Berkeley site:
“The Berkeley Audio Design Alpha USB is a breakthrough product that not only overcomes the limitations of the USB interface, but provides a state-of-the-art method of getting audio out of a computer.”
—Robert Harley, The Absolute Sound, Issue 214
“After four months using the Alpha USB, in combination with the Alpha DAC Series 2, I’m continually astonished by its level of performance. In fact, the Alpha USB is so good I’ve yet to hear a better digital interface. Period.”
—Chris Connaker, The Computer Audiophile, March 2012
People who care about facts need measurements, otherwise we can say anything and anything goes. And what does ‘in which case’ mean? That you take those comments at face value?
So you did listen to all DACs ever made and found USB to be bad.
of course not, but the dacs I did audition up to $20k I liked the other inputs better than usb. I hated usb for about 15 years now when I started buying the tweaks/gimmicks to make usb sound better.
The article I am referencing was in the April 2024 TAS issue about the Berkeley Audio Design Alpha USB series 2 Noise Isolation Device. So when somebody said these quotes and product came out 10 years ago, they were correct. But since this device is current, it tells me that usb over the past 10 years hasn’t improved. My dac is about 4 years old now, and when I auditioned it, I used both usb and ethernet and ethernet was better, and that was using a $750 AQ diamond usb cable and a $400 AQ ethernet cable.
Then over the years, I heard my dac with the owner using i2s which I thought sounded better than ethernet. But for the last couple of years, it was tough to find a good device that I could use to provide i2s, since most of the devices went from usb to i2s. Months ago, there is a streamer that provides only i2s and spdif outputs and with my $1000 i2s cable, i2s sounds much better than the ethernet input.
What that tells me is that people still fall for the irrational USB hate, which has no basis in reality. They also hate measurements because they prove them wrong.
There is nothing to improve in a digital interface, and paying $1k for a digital cable of any kind makes even less sense than using I2S over USB.
How many non-usb $20k dacs have you owned? Even $10k dacs? How many Ethernet and i2s capable dacs have you owned?
The answer to all of these questions is 0.
A $1000 cable is such a small percentage of the cost of my system. The better the system the better the cables will make a difference.
The cheaper the system, cables won’t matter, neither will an expensive dac.
I’m as leery of “snake oil” as anyone in the hobby and have seen plenty of it over the past 50 years, but it is just as foolish to lean on measurements in assessing the quality of music reproduction. My go-to system includes an R2R DAC feeding a tube-based headphone amp. Both “measure” poorly compared to my ESS-based DAC and Class D amp but outperform them by a considerable margin. There is a place for measurements surely but overreliance on them can be equally foolish.
FWIW – I have the Jeff Rowland Aeris DAC with the PSU. The Aeris has USB, Toslink and BNC Coaxial S/PDIF inputs. The king himself (aka Jeff) unequivocally asserts that, while he has optimized the asynchronous USB input stage, using the BMC Coaxial S/PDIF input is musically superior. In fact, when using the USB input connection, the DAC is limited to 24/96, whereas the BNC & Toslink inputs will stream 24/192.
