Coax to Optical Converters Anygood?

Rodge-- Milk toast diatribe? Good one. Well at least it was short.

But seriously, and in deference to your 25+ years of experience, without further qualification, your original question frankly made it seem like you didn't have much experience with digital audio. Hence my simple question to you.

Now that we know the unit you are looking at is actually considerably more than just a DAC, things make more sense. The Dual Core 2.0 indeed sounds intriguing, but given its lack of coax input, the company clearly is focusing on computer audio.

Best of luck finding a coax to optical converter to complement your transport.

The Dual Core is designed to work with analog, computer, and digital input.
Here is DSPeaker's reason for using optical rather than coax as taken from the FAQs page:

Q: Coax s/pdif (RCA) sounds better than optical tosink in our ears and due to the listening tests we have done in the past. So why use optical?

A: Our system does not derive its analog to digital converter (DAC) clock from the digital input(s), so jitter in the input is not a problem. Ant jitter in the input gets removed in the process, so there is no difference between the quality of coaxial and optical input in this respect.
The huge advantage of using optical is that there is no ground connection between devices.

Thanks for the encouagement :-). If I can't find a good converter I may stay with my trans/dac combo and use the line level input.

If in fact the unit's DAC function is insensitive to jitter on the incoming signal, then it should also have minimal, if any, sensitivity to the quality of the converter (assuming the converter is at least good enough to function reliably).

On the other hand, this comment by Steve Nugent of Empirical Audio, in this thread, would seem to be relevant:

It's strictly marketing that says that all jitter is eliminated. Never happens. I have yet to find a DAC that is not improved by a low-jitter source.

So the bottom line would seem to be that the DAC will have considerably less sensitivity to converter quality than DACs that don't use comparable asynchronous technology, but exactly how much sensitivity would remain is speculative.

Regards,
-- Al

Good points, Al. However, perhaps the DAC/unit in question has a sort of asynch function built in. Possibly a Pace Car, if you will, built in?

I don't know the unit, nor have I looked it up. Just theorizing.

If the unit is truly insensitive to jitter, then I'd assume any converter that outs bit perfectly will work.

Yes, Kbark, based on the claimed insensitivity to jitter I'd assume that the D/A conversion process is performed by this unit asynchronously to the clock on the incoming signal. Which will greatly reduce the importance of the quality of the converter. However, respecting Steve's experience in these matters, I would not necessarily conclude that the resulting sonics will be COMPLETELY insensitive to jitter on the incoming signal.

I wouldn't rule out the possibility that there could be some subtle effects that occur in the circuitry, or that are inherent in the processing algorithms, that would result in a theoretically complete insensitivity to jitter being less than perfect.

In any event, I think we're both agreed that the choice of a converter is less critical than what the OP appears to have been envisioning. And that reports of experiences with particular converters need to be considered in the context of the jitter rejection capability, if any, of the particular DAC that was being used.

Regards,
-- Al