SBGK wrote: > To conclude, the Touch is just too noisy to live in revealing system. > The EDO mod shows up the inadequacies of the spdif out, but the EDO mod > introduces noise itself, not least the 2500 per second usb interrupts. > I would suggest you need to be careful making blanket statements such as this. At best this is a statement of what you hear in your system and at worst its possible that you have an expectation bias of the changes (cf your assersion that EDO 0.7 and 0.6 are vastly different... or tuning buffers beyond their max value makes a difference...)
I think what we can say is that in any computer based music system there may be some level of cpu activity related noise which is present on the power rail/ground plane. Whether this can be detected on the output interface will be hardware design specific and what impact this has on the downstream components will be very dependant on the construction of the downstream component. In this case it sounds like your usb-spdif device is suseptible to noise on the usb interface. Its likely than many well implemented async usb dacs may be less suseptible, others will be. However the assersion that Touch is worse than a PC is a blanket statement which I don't think you can stand by. It will depend on the PC, its operating system and specifically the output interface hardware and its power rails. There is simply too much variablity there to be able to say that it will be inheriently better or worse that Touch. As for how the touch output process influence sound quality - I suspect that the main issue here is that there is so little going on within touch that you can detect the impact of indiviual software processes/tasks on the power rails. On a generic PC there will be many more active threads and so I suspect the background cpu activity/noise is far more diffuse. However if you look at specific outputs such as usb then you will see regular interrupts which are handled by the kernel in just the same way as touch (everything uses ehci based usb chipsets for instance). There will also be application layer things which can be tuned, but the impact this has on the output will be very dependant on the hardware implementation. To summarise - I think the best you can conclude is that with your vlink 192 you can detect more noise from Touch than from your PC. I don't think this should put people off using the touch - it may mean they want to look at true asyc dacs (where there is a fixed clock is next to the D/A converter and there is no spdif/pll) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Triode's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=94855 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
