Lego wrote:lejonklou wrote:Isochronous USB provides an much less processed connection between the digital source (in this case, the Gigabyte motherboard) and the DAC. This gives the motherboard more influence over the sound quality; if it's good, it will sound good. But if it's not very good it will not sound very good. And there is zero tolerance for dropouts in the datastream.
Asynchronous will buffer the signal from the digital source and try to isolate the DAC from the quality aspects of the datastream. In practice those qualities will however still leak through to the DAC and can be heard. The increased processing is not good for sound quality, unless you fine tune every component and its process for maximum musicality. Every step of the transmission and processing has a musical impact.
Travelling digital signals are very sensitive to processing, much more so than I first thought. To make digital signal processing musical is very difficult, so the simpler the processing is, the easier it becomes to get it right.
Thanks Fredrik thats good to know.
What changed your mind about the noise issue with USB dacs , and where do you see Hakai upgrades coming from in the future as it seems as far as hardware goes travelling to the past is better.
I'm not sure whether I changed my mind about USB. There
are better ways of connecting the motherboard to the DAC than using the USB port, but this way is very simple and good enough. HAKAI is a DIY project.
Regarding HAKAI upgrades, I don't think that "past is better" is any definitive rule. I think it's rather a matter of unfortunate circumstances.
* It seems the data compressing controller IC's of current SSD's is the main reason why they sound bad - which may change in the future.
* There is a bunch of new low-power/heat/clock frequency motherboards that seem promising, but so far the ones I've tried have been a disappointment. This bad luck may change at any moment.
* Isochronous USB DAC's are definitely not in fashion right now, so there I'm unsure. But it's possible to build one from scratch, using a great DAC chip. Not that I'm doing so at the moment, I'm just saying it's possible.
* The power supply definitely doesn't follow the "past is better" rule. There might be better ones out there than Nano160.