rgro;696779 Wrote: > Looking at all the excitement over Triode's work with asynchronous USB > stuff, can someone explain to all of us numpties if asynch USB is > somehow "better" than, for instance, using a "regular" dac's connection > to the Touch via coax or toslink? > > For instance, my Rega dac has a USB input. If the efforts to refine > the Touch's USB output are ultimately successful, and reliably so, > would there be some advantage to my implementing the Rega's USB > connection vs. the coax/toslink connections? > > Thank you.
The answer of course is "it depends"! On the same DAC a well implemented asynch USB input should be better than a well implemented S/PDIF interface. Its that "well implemented" that is the important part. There are a lot of poorly implemented USB inputs. A significant number of async inputs are not implemented very well and thus loose a lot of the benefits of "asyncness". There used to be a large number of dacs that just added a cheap USB to S/PDIF converter in front of their existing S/PDIF input, these will almost always sound worse than direct S/PDIF input. The issue here is that essentially ALL S/PDIF inputs have some mechanism to track the data rate of the incomming data. Such a tracking system can always be bettered by a fixed frequency system. Thats what async does, it uses a fixed frequency local clock, and tells the source to change the overall data rate so it matches the local clock. IF that fixed clock is done very well this should be better than any form of tracking. Of course not all async USB implementation are created equal. There are some very good one, and some very lousy ones. (I simply don't get it why a company goes to the trouble of implementing an async interface and uses a lousy clock) Even today there are a large number of adaptive (ie non-async) USB inputs around, unless very well done these will usually be worse than a very well done S/PDIF interface. My experience has shown that the Touch makes a very good platform for USB DACs, so a very well done async USB interface connected to a Touch will probably outperform most S/PDIF interfaces. Note there is still wiggle room here. I have a DAC I built myself with a REALLY good S/PDIF input, it will outperform almost anything expect the very best async USB interfaces. But even with that I can build a really good async USB that will beat it. (neither are cheap!) On your specific DAC, I don't know. Is the USB input a good async implementation? If yes it could very well be better than the S/PDIF input. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=94218 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list Touch@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
