USB signal timing goes mainstream. Just an FYI

Just sayin', none of that technical gibberish ( and I'm a 30+ year EE in both fields) has the slightest thing to do with clock recovery and timing.  The fundamentals persist regardless of forma or content - the bits must be recovered, and in digital music protocols, the specific timing must be recovered to reconstruct fully half the Cartesian coordinate info needed for PAM or PAM like representations.

Over and out.

The best USB DACs for music all use asynchronous mode.  Eliminates this as an issue.  I could go into detail.  But do your own homework.  EMM does, Wavelength Audio (Gordon Rankin) does.. as do many others.

The best USB DACs for music all use asynchronous mode.  Eliminates this as an issue.  I could go into detail.  But do your own homework.  EMM does, Wavelength Audio (Gordon Rankin) does.. as do many others.

You are correct both in the fact that they do, and that it ought to eliminate any difference.  And the EMM labs unit is excellent.  My prototypes also work that way*.  The fly in the ointment is.....ground and power noise still impact it and i do not fully understand exactly how/why. But they do.  And Ed has commented on this in the past too (i cant recall where).

At the very least though, a noisy ground and/or power supply, without isolation, can pollute the analog power supplies in any DAC. And those power supplies are, frankly, more important than most of the issues that audiophiles debate endlessly like specific chips....



* so far i have only in fact prototyped this part of the DAC - USB interface, powering, isolation, clocking --- and then spitting out either SP/DIF or if possible LRBW or I2S to existing commercial back-ends (DAC chip itself, reconstruction filter). These things take a lot of time to optimize.

i should clarify; i presume you mean DAC as master clock, with the ability to terminate, buffer, & re-clock, whcih is what i do and what i believe meitner does.