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Hold on a second there Pepe...

Posted by Presto (A) on January 21, 2007 at 16:11:40

In Reply to: Re: USB DACs --- yeah or neah? posted by pepe on January 21, 2007 at 13:53:49:

Pepe:

There are many many folks who are very adverse to using SPDIF - especially with an asynchronous sample rate conversion (ASRC) chip in the signal path to deal with two different clocks - one in the receiver/DAC and the other one that was used to clock the data in the tranmitter.

If you ask me, the "bullshit" is when 2-wire SPDIF became a consumer standard. It was originally designed as a "test point" or some darned thing - not as a digital transmission method. Even in Europe they use the AES/EBU which is much more of a studio oriented solution than consumer spdif. Just look at the higher tranmission voltages alone...

Why do *most* professional audio solutions (DACs, soundcards, etc) all have wordclock I/O and master/slave selectivity? It's to permit syncing to ONE GOOD CLOCK which has tremendous advantages over "slightly different clocks all over the place" and all kinds of compensation and compromise circuits to make up for it. The whole consumer audio realm has it backwards - they put the master clock in the CD transport and slave the DAC instead of the other way around.

Now your point about 'sonics is what matters at the end' is valid. That IS what matters around here. >>>How does it sound versus how much does it cost and is it good value or plain expensive?<<< I get that. But there is good science behind all of the digital transmission stuff. And some of it is good science trying to make up for bad design decisions made back when digital was in its infancy. Some of it, however, is "Hey - there is a right way to do this..."

I don't know. Maybe I'm buying into some engineering bullshit. But I work in engineering - so it's okay...

I guess I am just used to it! :P

Cheers,
Presto

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