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Phil Gold wrote in his EMM review the following:

http://www.enjoythemusic.com/superioraudio/

The key consideration for any external DAC is how to minimize or eliminate jitter. We've seen analog Phase Locked Loops (PLLs), digital PLLs and RAM buffers. Ed Meitner discards all of these methods in favor of his new MFAST (Meitner Frequency Acquisition System) technology, an asynchronous method which simply discards the clock embedded in the original signal. I asked EMM Labs' Shahin Al Rashid to explain:

If the signal did not come in over Optilink, then the MDAT circuits in the DAC2 upsample it to 5.6mHz before passing it to the discreet dual differential DACs, unique to EMM Labs, for conversion to analog. Ed Meitner believes that all available DAC chips exhibit some degree of non linearity, and that his design aims can only be achieved with discreet components. And sorry, he is not willing to sell his DAC circuitry to any other manufacturers. If you want his solution, there's only one place to go to get it. We'll let the listening tests answer the $64,000 question – is he right?

So there's a large number of ways to get the digital signal in, only one of which will currently accept a truly high resolution signal. The USB signal is currently limited to a ceiling of 48 kHz and the AES, TosLink and Coax top out at 96 kHz. However, this is an upgradeable DAC (through its USB port) and you can expect future software upgrades to take you up to 192 kHz sampling frequencies.

This is a confusing explanation and I generally not a big fun of the EMM Labs sound. Whatever they do I consider that the DACs with mandatory rate conversion are faulty idea by default. Still, disregarding what EMM does sonically the Meitner’s designer intelligence must not be discarded and I would like to hear more about his MFAST method.

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