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Why USB to SPDIF and not optical?

Using a Mac Mini as my music server, and was wondering why the sound would be better converting the USB to SPDIF to my Bel Canto Dac3 as opposed to just hooking up a mini to Toslink? If there is a valid reason, what is a less expensive alternative to the Bel Canto USB Link?
lgoler
dtc's avatar
dtc
1,047 posts
 
In addition, XP generally upscales 44.1 files to 48 unless special drives are installed. Does the 24/96 link help with that problem?
mmarvin19
157 posts
 
FYI, y'all:
My system - PC, Windows XP, ASIO4ALL, JRiver Jukebox > Belkin USB out to Giga Lab Moon USB DAC(NOS). My DAC also has coax and optical ins.

On a whim this afternoon, I inserted a $30 Behringer USB headphone amp (which also converts USB to optical) between the PC and the DAC (optical from the Behringer to the DAC). I was amazed to hear at least a 10% sound improvement, especially on my FLAC downloads from HD Tracks.

Apparently, my DAC prefers optical over USB, but I don't know why.
dtc's avatar
dtc
1,047 posts
 
Mmarvin19 - The JRiver and ASIO configuration is one I am intertested in but have not tried yet. Can you tell if you get 44.1 MHz out of both the Belkin and the Behringer? And do both pass higher frequency without re-sampling? I check this by hooking it up to my HT receiver which reports the input signal sampling frequency. Thanks.
audioengr
3,282 posts
 
"XP generally upscales 44.1 files to 48 unless special drives are installed."

Not true. My USB converter uses the native drivers and it outputs 44.1 on XP. There are several ways to avoid kmixer, including:

1) unmapping the device
2) Kernel Streaming
3) ASIO

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
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dtc
1,047 posts
 
Steve - Let me re-phrase - "XP generally upscales 44.1 files to 48 unless special software is installed to bypasses the XP upscaling". You are correct that is not only a driver issue. Unfortunately the simple solution of unmapping the device often disables the device so it is not a general solution - at least for me The specific issue I was addressing is whether the Bel Canto managed to bypass this upconversion. If there is no additional software other than the native drives, I would suspect that the upconversion still happens. Do you concur? Does your converter get 44.1 out of iTunes? As I understand it, neither KS or ASIO is available for iTunes. If that is incorrect I would love to know a general process for bypassing the upconversion when using iTunes. I like the iTunes interface, but am frustrated by the uponversion. Any insight would be appreciated.
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