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RE: If we can find enought of these USB doodads to 'daisy chain' together...

There is nothing specific about USB here. The problem is how isolation can be implemented. If you look at how digital logic circuitry works you will find that there are three levels, the physical waveforms, the transistor switches and the circuit boards with their signal traces power and ground planes. All of these interact and make it difficult to isolate noise on the input signals. If the transistors were hard switches and there were no leakage on the ground planes and power planes due to inductance and capacitance then it would be possible to use a few stages of shift register to eliminate input noise on the incoming signal. This could easily be done in one chip. One stage of a shift register only uses a dozen or so transistors but millions fit on a chip.

The problem is that this won't work because there will be leakage around all of the intended circuit components and there will be leakage from the circuit boards and through the power supply. This is why there has to be multiple stages of filtering to get sufficient isolation. I don't see the slightest problem with spending $600 for three Regens or other isolation equipment if it eliminates all dependence on the computer source when it comes to sound quality. Indeed, if this worked it would be a bargain. Of course several of these could be packaged together with the DAC in a single physical chassis for those who are not of the DIY bent.

My personal belief is that USB is not the best way to do this isolation, because of the complexity of the USB protocol and its packet nature. However, from a product standpoint USB is a good selection, because it is a standard and creates a ready market for a product that can go between many computers and many DACs. Ethernet is not likely to be any better, because it is also a packet based system and it requires even more protocol processing than USB to get a workable system. This means that both USB and Ethernet renderers need isolation inside the DAC that is downstream of their input circuitry, and indeed, multiple stages of isolation, separate power supplies, separate shielded cages, etc... None of this needs to be particularly costly if it works. In particular it allows the DAC manufacturer to capture the audiophile dollar with the customer buying a dirt cheap commodity computer so that he can afford the high end DAC.

None of this will get any traction until audiophiles and reviewers understand that improving the sound in the computer is ultimately a dead end and contrary to the entire premise of digital audio. It may be an expedient tweak today, but it is only a tweak and it does not and can not solve the problem. This can only be solved in the DAC, with tweaks in the computer only going so far.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

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