usb dac for hi-end system


I will be integrating a new mac mini to my hi-end system what will be my 2 options?
- cost vs value
- cost no object?
emre
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.
And to add what to Jeff said, it doesn't make a difference if you use firewire or USB because all you are doing is sending bits from one place to another. The better implementations using either interface do not try to recover clocking from the input data stream. So, in this case if the sound is really different (vs imagined) and all other things being equal, the bits would have to be changed to account for the difference in sound. This is easy to prove right or wrong. Just copy files between a USB drive and something else with data integrity checks. How many times will the target data not match the source data?

And, most likely many "professional" studios/people use firewire because it was the interface of choice on MACs where just about all the "good" music software started and still exists. And it does have some advantages over USB, especially for multiple devices which not the setup most people use to take PCM from a disk drive and send it to a DAC.