_USB_IS_EASY_TO_ADOPT_ USB is now ubiquitous on computers as a wired technology, and most people already manage electronic music collections on the PCs already, whether using iTunes, Windows Media Player, WinAmp, XMMS, Foobar2k, Songbird or whatever.
Given that as a starting point, people wanting improved fidelity will often take the path of least resistance and add a USB DAC and a USB cable. It's a technology people are used to using for plugging in a mouse, a digital camera or an MP3 player. People have the confidence to adopt it, even if they are technically challenged. Better still, they can keep using the same software to mange their library and avoid any new learning curve there as well. _*USB_Audio_Excellence_is_Much_More_Difficult*_ When you dig a bit deeper though, you find that most PC operating systems mess with digital audio in no-so-benign ways, and make it very hard to achieve bit-perfect reproduction to the DAC. The main issue is that of resampling of digital audio by the OS to allow many different sources of audio to mixed together in a combined audio feed to the sound card. So while USB audio is a simple proposition on the surface, audiophile USB gets to be a much more complex proposition with (Otachan's) ASIO DLLs, WASAPI for Vista, tuning the Core Audio sample rate for the MAC to the source material or application etc. _WHICH_CLOCK_IS_THE_MASTER_HERE?_ And if you care enough to avoid sample rate conversion by the PC operating system, you will also want to avoid trying to slave a good quality DAC clock to a poor quality PC clock source, which may lead to spending serious money one of Gordon Rankin's DACs that can do asynchronous-mode transfers and so avoid that pitfall. But Squeezeboxes also do asynchronous mode transfers to fill their internal buffers, and if you've invested in a Transporter you've been able to preserve the merits of that architecture all the way through the system to the analog domain (not so much if you use SPDIF output from a cheaper SB client). _ASYNCHRONOUS_TRANSFER,_BIT_PERFECT_-AND-_WIRELESS_ Added to all this you get the convenience of wireless and can keep that noisy computing equipment out of the listening room! -- dsdreamer ---------------------- "Dreamer, easy in the chair that really fits you..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ dsdreamer's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=12588 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=66342 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
