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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: Thanks for the review, & postings: question

The isolation would need to be outside of the chip, specifically on the data lines, the power lines and the clock lines. There would be packaging issues, e.g. the way the ground planes were laid out on the circuit board(s) and possible need for shielding, etc...

The DAC manufacturer is selling a digital to analog converter. It is the function of this device to take a digital signal and convert it to analog. This includes dealing with the reality that all digits are not equal, but reading them as if they were: 0 101110110 111 101 is the same number as 0101110110111101.

With an asynchronous USB connection, there is no transporation or timing provided by the so called "transport". This terminology goes back to analog tape recorders, where the transport did control the timing of the music. This is not how modern DACs work. There is no "transport". There is a digital storage device. In the absence of overrun errors or CRC errors on the USB cable, any sound quality differences that depend on the source are entirely the fault of the DAC and can be reduced just as effectively by removing them inside the DAC as removing them inside the computer. (Or removing them in between, as with the REGEN.) It may be more expiditious to improve the transport than redo the DAC, or it may not. However, if the DAC is sensitive to its transport it shows that the DAC is not properly acting as digital to analog converter.

This is made obvious by John S's explanation of noise being created by the PHY chip. That chip is inside the DAC and it is the DAC designer's fault if he has not taken into account the characteristics of the chips he specifies.



Tony Lauck

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


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