John, Thanks for an outstanding and well thought out reply. I agree with everything you said. And silly me forgot about the impedance mismatch issue between source and destination. One of the reasons I wanted the short spdif cable between the output of the usb to spdif box and the spdif input of the dac was to greatly reduce the possibility of bad impedance mismatch from excessive cable length (due to reflections, etc.). And short cables do solve that issue.
However, I totally thought (incorrectly) that the mfr.'s of all of these boxes would adhere to some sort of standardized spec input and output impedance for the spdif I/O. I guess I was naive. Or perhaps the I/O impedance spec on spdif is poorly specified or not at all? Quite sobering. Maybe disappointing is more like it. Well, if true, it sucks and explains a few more of the gotchas in this hobby (I notice there are many). But I also infer that very good design in the receiving dac and the touch or usb to spdif box can mitigate some of this potential source to destination impedance mismatch. So I gather I had part of the solution ---let the ethernet handle the long jog and keep the usb or spdif short. But to avoid the source/destination impedance mismatch issue it would be far better to go from the touch using a short usb cable via asynch usb. And, the receiving dac still has to be pretty well designed to perform the asynch correctly. OK. So now I am back to wondering which dacs the EDO applet will work on. And I think you are saying to just try it and see and report back. Does the above summarize correctly the gist of your reply (to make sure I understand correctly)? And since the dacs I am interested in pursuing (the peachtree idac I have now is a loaner for audition purposes ) are the NAD M51 and Anedio D2 and possibly the NAD C390DD -- does anyone have info if the USB input of any of these will work with the EDO applet? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ jksbt's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=55836 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=94512 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
