Since it's a long weekend here in British Columbia, I was thinking today about that "spectral smearing" which I showed the other day out of the XONAR Essence One when testing the Touch with various digital cables.
I had noticed this spreading of the base even with my USB playback. As a result I thought I'd try some measurements to see whether this changes with the USB port and drivers used... Lo and behold... It does make a difference! When I made that Touch jitter recording, the E1 was connected to my ASrock Z77 Extreme4's motherboard USB3 port and it looked a bit like this (DirectSound): 14459 Look what happens when I move it over to the USB2 port (DirectSound): 14460 That "wide base" is now gone and the noise floor is on average slightly higher but the spikes have cleaned up! Interesting... It looks like there's some kind of interaction between the Essence One and the USB interface. Some of this must be the electrical noise from the computer itself but the decreased spectral smearing probably has to do with less low level jitter through the USB2. Also, I decided to try the different driver "modes" as well - here's ASIO with the USB2 interface (as opposed to the DirectSound driver above): 14462 The noise floor drops. A nice tangible "proof" that ASIO works better by directly going to the hardware instead of running through the Windows mixer even though the volume is 100%. I guess this highlights the complex interactions between hardware and software in a computer environment. I can see how folks could agonize over the details and manufacturers could sell products with claims that could be "true" (eg. the SOtM tX-USB Audiophile PCI to USB Audio Card could measure really well compared to my motherboard interfaces). Again, I really can't say I hear a difference despite the above measurements. If it weren't for doing these measurements, I would not have known about these kinds of changes! +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Filename: E1_-_Mobo_USB2_ASIO.jpg | |Download: http://forums.slimdevices.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=14462| +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Archimago's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2207 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97950 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
