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Re: Considering Squeezebox -- Please help

Posted by BFitz (A) on September 7, 2005 at 14:19:38

In Reply to: Re: Considering Squeezebox -- Please help posted by richs on September 6, 2005 at 19:51:12:

"What I've read about USB DACs says their advantage is not in more accurate data being fed, but in the timing"

When you get away from a traditional transport with rotating CD and go to a hard drive, you essentially move from a real time bits system to a buffered data system. All the computer driven devices will be bursting data at very high rates, with error checking, then buffering the data locally. In USB and SB2 boxes using analog out, the local timing clock (crystal) in the box is the master clock, used to clock data to the DAC chip. There should be no inherent advantage of one format (ethernet vs. USB) over the other, all other things (clock quality, power supply, DAC chip / analog components) being the same.

When you go back to S/PDIF out from either a USB or SB2, you go back to a clock embedded in data, requiring a receiver chip like the CS8414 with inherent random jitter in the downstream DAC. If the DAC has a 2 stage PLL or other sophisticated jitter reduction (like Benchmark) it may be just fine. If not, you are back in the scenario where the master clock is in the previous box, with the DAC receiver phase locked to it over S/PDIF.

The point is, if you are concerned about timing problems, the best case scenario is having the the master clock in the same box as the DAC chipset, and both USB and SB2 using analog out have this. I'm not so sure timing is everything, but that's another post.
Bob

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