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Advantage of PS Audio Bridge II over USB cable from PC?

I play digital content in my system, which includes a PS Audio Perfect Wave II DAC, into an Audio Research SP16-L tube pre, Bryston 4B-ST amp, and Aerial 10T MKIIs. Most of the time, I stream Tidal or Spotify via USB cable from a PC. I have high-speed internet (120 Mpbs down, 20 Mpbs up), piped through a Netgear Nighthawk X4S router wirelessly to the PC. It’s my first high-end audio system, which I built after finding the Aerials at an estate sale for a bargain price, along with some fat Kimber cables.

My question: What benefit if I upgrade the Perfect Wave DAC II with the Bridge II circuit card? Near as I can judge from PS Audio’s website, it would allow me to connect the DAC wirelessly to my home network, and control it from a smartphone or tablet. Aside from those conveniences, what difference in SQ should I expect for the $899 upgrade?   Thanks for any insights.

128x128rwroberts
cymbop
315 posts
 
I'm still delighted with my PWDII after all these years.  

Getting the Bridge II was an instant game-changer for sound quality over the Squeezebox Touch via coax I had been using to feed the PWDII.

You get the capability to use Roon (game changer II) and MQA decoding taboot.  

I never looked back and could hardly imagine life without the BII.  
audioengr
3,282 posts
 

It's hard to say what the improvement will be with this particular implementation, but I can tell you with my own products I did an apples-to-apples comparison of galvanically isolated XMOS USB to Ethernet and here are the results:

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=155232.msg1660913#msg1660913

Steve N.

Empirical Audio

nitewulf
422 posts
 
Unfortunately the Bridge II doesn't connect wireless, you have to have a server setup and route/stream using an Ethernet cable. What it does is double the re-clocking of the signal using their digital lens. If you have the PWD MK2, it has a digital lens which re-clocks the incoming signal (NativeX mode), as does the Bridge 2, so essentially the incoming signal is re-clocked twice and most people agree it improves the audio. I was never able to get the bridge working so I couldn't test it. But the PWD MK2 on NativeX mode sounds extremely impressive...essentially no oversampling/upsampling of the original audio source and asynchronous re-clocking to eliminate jitter.
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