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ADDENDUM - April 28, 2012 - Trial with USB...

For fun, tonight I spent another hour or so comparing with USB out.

The thing I found was that I could not get SqueezePlay to output through USB, but I could with Decibel & Audirvana.

So, this is what I did. For each of the songs, I played them as close as possible simultaneously with the SqueezePlay output going to the DAC1 via TosLink, and at the same time, the Audirvana/Decibel goes out to USB via an AudioQuest Cinnamon 0.75m cable. Even with the computer playing 2 24/96 streams, CPU utilization remained <20% peak (usually <10%). Memory utilization <3GB (6GB machine).

Tracks played:
Hans Zimmer & Lisa Gerrard - "Now We Are Free" 16/44
Rebecca Pidgeon - "Spanish Harlem" Katz 15th Anniversary 24/88
Grateful Dead - "Ripple" from American Beauty - DVD-A rip 24/96
Ana Caram - "Olha Maria" 16/44
West End Girls - "It's A Sin" 16/44

With this configuration, I can switch between the 2 outputs even quicker! It now takes about 1 second or less to switch between either:
WiFi --> SqueezePlay --> OS X default CoreAudio --> optical miniTosLink --> DAC1 Pre
SSD --> Decibel / Audirvana --> (internal 64-bit processing) --> USB --> DAC1 Pre

Conclusion: NO DIFFERENCE between the 2 very different ways of playing audio from my MacBook Pro. I can flip between the 2 inputs and felt no subjective difference in the sound - tonal quality, microdynamics, detail, transients, etc... sound identical.

IMO, as far as I can tell, "bit perfect" play back seems indistinguishable with my setup whether theoretically jittery WiFi/TosLink or presumably better SSD/USB setup. Maybe the DAC1 does a good job rejecting jitter, but so far, I see no need to run any fancy playback software and TosLink seems just as good as the USB in this configuration.


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Archimago's Musings: A 'more objective' audiophile blog.


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