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Re: The art of building Computer Transports

Your paper is interesting and you have obviously spent a lot of time 'optimising' your system as have I.

I too at first find my fanless Commell system with Lynx AES 16 card 'as good as' my dCS 972/954 setup. However, having bought an all class a capacitorless adc/dac (Universal 2192) and clock (Apogee Big Ben), and integrating the compter versus fixed transport boxes into the same replay chain (Palcette Audio constant impedance balanced passive) into Accuphase A50 amp, I can now confidentaly say that my fixed boxes are better. The problem with the computer system seems to be due to the poor clocking from the sound card (this is generally true no matter what is said; the XOs used are are not great)and noise and radiation within the system. This is inspite of the claim by Lynx that their clock is superior.

With the Big Ben as Master clock and dejitter playing into the dCS 972 at 4x upsampling, I am getting 'better than analog' playback
in terms of imaging, superior s/n and superior music. The Lynx system is now quite inferior, although I have not yet clocked the card using the Big Ben.

The problem with computer audio is the multiplicity in setting up parameters. There are many claims on what the optimal settings are, and a lot of hot air about jitter. But there has never been meausrements to back these up, except for some measurements of sound cards and the slim devices streamers in Stereophile. There is also no ransparency in what software or their plug-in do. For example, Foobar can be made to sound quite different dependig on what version of the ASIO plugin is used. I am also not convinced that SRC sounds better all the time than SSRC.

So, my issue is with validity and generalisation of the superiority of computer audio. I do not dispute that this can be made to sound good, as I have done using many of the techniques that you mention. But I maintain that your conclusion about them being superior to high end systems is invalid; you have merely chosen to optimise your computer system, not optimise both in parallel and compare as you develop. If this is not true, please post what you have done in comparing systems side by side with the same replay chain and I would like to learn from you.

ps: I am a professional engineer qualified in acoustics and measurement and control, and computer literate

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