usb dac for hi-end system

The Ayre is a very good USB dac but it is not the end of story. You need to listen to several in your system. The Ayre is optimized to run on USB and only offers a USB input. The technology Ayre utilizes is licensed from Wavelength which was a smart move on their part. There are several other options out there however that exceed the Ayre's performance but at it's price point it is a terrific value.

well actually ı have tried PS audio perfect wave dac it was ok but and also compared minjack toslink connected to scarlatti dac which was far more better despite that cable was a no name mass market toslink.
I will now lokk also to bel conto usbto spdif and weiss int 202.

I don't mean to get into the USB / FireWIre debate, but what about Asynchronous USB?
Doesn't that clear the board of some of the USB issues?
At a substantially higher cost?

No. Better but still, no. USB is still a very poor interface. All pro recording studios use firewire - must be for a reason, no? (everything we try to reproduce onour rigs was doe with firewire, not usb). Just look at the technology and history of both. USB is for mice, keyboards, printers - not music. I won't say USB doesn't sound decent in some system, but far from what can be accomplished by computers or music servers from a firewire interface. All still needs to be implemented properly but we should not dismiss the inferiority of USB. I, for one, just can't believe how many mfg's are actually trying to make USB work, or, actually, sell it to us.

The difference between Firewire and USB:

FireWire vs. USB 2.0 - Architecture
FireWire, uses a "Peer-to-Peer" architecture in which the peripherals are intelligent and can negotiate bus conflicts to determine which device can best control a data transfer


Hi-Speed USB 2.0 uses a "Master-Slave" architecture in which the computer handles all arbitration functions and dictates data flow to, from and between the attached peripherals (adding additional system overhead and resulting in slower data flow control)

The Wavelength and Ayre DAC's overcome any short comings in USB.