I think this depends on your dac, what it does to reduce jitter and if it is fussy about the frequency of the digital signal.
SB1 used an integrated chip to do the dsp functions and produce the spdif output. This had a known limitation that the exact frequency it produced could be slightly off 44.1 KHz and given that the chip vendor was unwilling to fix it, slim had no control over it. This is no cause for concern for the vast majority of dac users, but did impact some as their external dac was unable to lock onto the signal. There were also some reports of channels swapping over in SB1 due to the operation of the dsp chip. The dsp chip in SB1 also used a PLL to derive the clock used for the digital out. This means that the jitter on this clock is higher than that which would be obtained with a direct crystal based oscillator. SB2/3 should have all of this solved - the spdif output is generated directly from a crystal oscillator with no PLL. There are two separate crystals for 44.1 and 48 KHz sampling. So what does this mean, I would suggest: 1) If you dac is not fussy about the exact frequency of the digital input (does not experience 'lock' problems) and has internal circitry to reduce jitter, then you may not hear any benefit from SB2/3. 2) If however your dac is fussy about locking or does not have strong jitter rejection, then the SB2/3 is likely give better performance. The one hardware change between SB3 and SB2 will also be beneficial as it should further reduce the jitter on the digital output. In short SB3 (and 2) is definately technically better for the digital output than SB1. Whether you can hear this depends on how well your external dac hides the influence of jitter from the transport. -- Triode ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Triode's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18116 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
