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In the Forum: Didital Things
In the Thread: Pacific Microsonics Model 2
Post Subject: Sonic benfits of slaving PC interface to DACPosted by manisandher on: 6/22/2009
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 Romy the Cat wrote:

Did you try to listen and did detect sonic benefits from slaving your PC interface from you DAC? The Cat


Oh yes, I've tried this for sure. There is a difference between the three modes; DIG_IN, REFWCLK and MASTER. The first two seem to add something in the HF that I can imagine many people judging as being 'extra resolution' and therefore better. It's not unpleasant, but I find it distracting.

My order of preference is:
  1. MASTER (strong, strong preference - I will not listen to any other mode)
  2. REFWCLK
  3. DIG_IN
Thanks for the link. It's interesting that Dan Lavry doesn't see the point in using an external clock unit, believing the DAC's internal clock to be the best. Even when you have many units that you need to sync together, Dan seems to feel that daisy-chaining them is the best way.

In any event, it looks like I'm stuck with using modes 2. or 3. above for 176.4/192KHz sample rates. This is certainly not a disaster... until many more downloads that I'm interested in are recorded and offered exclusively at these rates (probably not very likely).

But another reason why I'd like to use the Model Two at these rates is that I think it uses a non-oversampling filter. When talking about the Model Two's ADC capability, Ritter wrote:

""If it's going to be a 176.4 or 192kHz DVD-Audio release, then we will not decimate that signal; we use a proprietary filter [non-oversampled] optimized to that sample rate. If it's going to be 88.2/96 kHz, we use 2:1 decimation, and once again we use a filter optimized to that frequency. But in both high-resolution settings, the Nyquist frequency is high enough that we don't use the 'dynamic decimation' process that becomes necessary when we go down to 44.1 or 48 kHz."

If the Model Two 'mirrors' this in its DAC, then 176.4/192 rates become interesting...

Mani.

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