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In the Forum: Didital Things
In the Thread: High Quality Music Server / CD player
Post Subject: Interfaces, interfacesPosted by Telstar on: 6/19/2009
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 Romy the Cat wrote:

 Telstar wrote:
I am convinced that the soundcard/interface is the main cause of the inferior performance of HDD vs. CD.

 I disagree. The main cause of the inferior performance of HDD vs. CD is not the soundcard/interface but the CD format itself and the fact that the CD are over-edited by deaf and semi-moronic people. If the CD be data CD and contain the raw 16/44 files than the qulety would be orders of magnetite more superior.

Also, yes, the music servers pop like mushrooms but it is meaningless. What those people put on their music servers? The copies from crappy CD? That is ridicules. The industry still holds control over music destitution and does not allow to have any row uncompressed files.  Without is anything else is garbage. If I did not have my FM source I would not even have and recognise not reasons in music servers.

The Cat


I think I got your point. There are a few 16/48 files that they say are not a cd-rip. No doubt they sound better.

But i was referring to the old crappy redbook format, and a track ripped to a computer (HDD, although, ad hinted before SSD or other solid state memory sound better because there are no moving parts). That was my point, ceteris paribus, a solid state memory has the potential to sound better than any spinning transport, in reproducing the same crappy file.
Why this rarely happens? The main culprit imo is the interface. I still dont see the light there with any of the current offerings. OS and software can be tamed to the point of not being an issue. Same happens for the elimination of moving parts. But the interface? No, there's no clear answer there.

What's the point of having a music server you ask, well, lazyness i guess. Having thousands of CDs at click distance it is handy. There are slick interfaces that show all the information contained in the booklet. Redbook is garbage, sure, but if somebody has thousands of that garbage, a music server it's really helpful.

Let's talk more of such interfaces.
-Asyncronous USB as programmed by Gordon seem well done, but it's limited to 24/96 in the best case. And while he corrected the main issue, he's still left with lots of jitter and noise picked up by the usb plug. Not to forget that such computer should NOT use any other usb device or the pollution multiplicates. USb 3.0, which will be available from the beginning of next year seem to overcome some of these (i'm still skeptical about jitter, because it depends also on the usb receiver in the dac, better receivers are needed).
-Firewire (asyncronous by itself). It's probably still the best interface IMO. The jitter is not ultralow by itself, but there are good receivers and transceivers (in particular i know a very good firewire to i2s transceiver). Like anything coming from a noisy source that is not isolated by itself, it requires very good isolation. Fortunately, there are such devices to perform a complete galvanic isolation to every pin of the receiver. A mid-level (for this i compare to <5k$ cdp) firewire dac is the Weiss DAC2/Minerva.*

-In the two above the clock is in the DAC, as it should be. But there are also internal interfaces (pci/pci-express), namely souncards at pro and consumer level.
They have more issues (see below), but also the advantage of lower jitter. The issues are first and foremost the power source pollution, esp if the power is taken from the pci or pci-e slot; rfi/emi, even if we are using them only to get digital signal out of the computer (i'm not considering using the internal DAC, although there's people who even do that and that equals to very entry level CDPs), and lastly the interface. We can have all of the following, but in 99% of the cases there's just spdif:
-spdif coaxial rca: high jitter, sensitive to noise. You can hardly get worse. No wait, stereo minijack to rca is even worse.
-spdif coaxial bnc: 1/20th jitter of rca, besides, it's still spdif.
-spdif toslink: immune to noise, but several times MORE jitter than coaxial.
-AES: just a bit better than unbalanced spdif, still high jitter and not completely shielded.
-i2s (requires modding the card): lowest jitter, but very sensitive to RFI/EMI, very short cable required (which means that the rfi/emi from the computer can pass to other electronic equipment). Not common in DACs, but in some cases easy to mod, as i2s is used as internal data input for a vast number of converters.
-ADAT: potentially good, 8ch = 2ch 24/192. Unseen receivers in any commercial DAC.
-ST or double ST: probably the best interface. Low jitter, completely isolated. Unseen in any soundcard, requires modding. Very few DACs accepts it (to my memory Esoteric D70, audio sintesys dax, something from Zanden)

In all the above, the interface is penalized at the start, if it cannot be slaved to the DAC (i'm talking about clock).

[* I would like to know the impressions on the AF1 that Mani is using, I assume that improved things vs the Lynx through AES)]

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