USB yet again


For a few years I have had an Intona Isolator with Oyaide Continental 5S upstream and Intona Reference downstream connecting Streamer and DAC. Given the Strong benefit of filters on the upstream Ethernet connection I added a LHY Audio USB 3.0 purifier with a Grey Knights power cable. The tightening of the transfer and resultant SQ was remarkable despite having used superior cables before.

While USB remains a compromised transfer format, asynchronous USB is the only protocol synchronising the server’s and dac’s clocks unless both have master clock connections. AES/EBU may have better noise rejection but has imbedded clock signal,SPDif is outdated as well as speed constrained and I2S not standardised. Hopefully the industry comes up with a better solution. It is interesting that there seems to emerge a trend to combine server and dac: one wonders why?

antigrunge2

@uncledemp 

Enjoyed reading your post. Our systems are true reflections of how that painting should look (replicated) in our environment. I think for many of us, it’s the pursuit of perfection more gratifying and fun than the actual result 😊

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USB is not inferior and offers superb sound quality in my opinion.  As always it depends on implementation and other digital supporting elements in one’s front end.   

@sns 

my point, precisely. I also steuggle with dependence on cables and cleaned up power