Audiophile USB to PCM

"At the moment, what you suggest seems like the way to go: PC card outputting upsampled digital via AES/EBU, with card driven by DAC wordclock."

The problem with PC add-in cards is the PC power supply and grounding. The external box will be quieter and have lower jitter. It can also be battery powered, which improves things considerably.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Manufacturer/modder

Gonglee wrote:
"How is transit stock? Pretty good quality?"

Not really. Only has Toslink output.

Why is the mod necessary and how do we do it?

To eliminate the Toslink output and improve the power and clock. Really difficult mod unless you are a professional reworker.

Also, can you explain how to upsample in foobar or itune?

This is explained on my website on the "Computer Audio" webpage: http://www.empiricalaudio.com . All of the links are there. If you need ASIO for Foobar2000, just send me an email and I will send it to you.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Manufacturer/modder

Kfreichen - the modded Transit is a product that I sell. It has a modified Superclock3, improved power, including Black Gates and the Toslink is replaced with coax output. I chose the Transit because it has some of the best drivers, does not require switching to do 24/96 and passes most all formats, including MP3 and AC3. more info is at:
http://www.empiricalaudio.com

I'm not the only modder using the Transit. My mods are the most technical though. Several manufacturers use this as their reference source.

Edsilva - I found the Edirol UA-25 to be fairly good, but great after I modded it. I only used the Edirol in "advanced" mode to output 24/96, which uses a custom driver on the PC rather than the windows driver, which is terrible.

If the Waveterminal passes 44.1, then this would make sense. It must use a custom driver.

The driver makes the biggest difference in sound, but it is also important to bypass windows Kmixer with ASIO plug-in for Foobar2000. If you dont have ASIO plug-in for Foobar2000 just email me and I will send it to you. You can tell if you are going through Kmixer by bringing up the windows volume controls and see if any of the sliders affect the volume while you are playing music. If they do, then you are still going through Kmixer. You need ASIO.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Manufacturer/modder
nugent@empiricalaudio.com

I double checked, I am using the ASIO with foobar... The waveterminal does not upsample, however.