Genesis Digital Lens and Airport Express = good

[flohmann]

Thought I'd mention this for others like me who rely on the Apple Airport Express and AirTunes to get digital from the computer to my stereo rig. For me, the Apple Lossless + iTunes + Airport Express + iPhone Remote is a killer interface combination. So that is a nonnegotiable starting point.

Then the question is how to get that jitter-prone toslink output to sound good. The standard against which I'm measuring is my Mark Levinson 390S CD player/processor (into a Headroom Blockhead and HD650 or into my Quad 988 speakers).

I've been experimenting with a couple options. First, was feeding from the Express into the Benchmark DAC-1 ($700 used). That's actually quite good, demonstrating that $1000 today buys you about 90% of what $6000 bought you 5 years ago. The jitter rejection on the Benchmark apparently makes a difference, as it's much better than feeding the Express directly into the Levinson (which has an optical digital input, but without the sophisticated reclocking that the Benchmark does).

I also bought a Genesis Digital Lens ($500 used) -- essentially a RAM buffer for reclocking digital inputs. This product was the brainchild of Paul McGowan of PS Audio, who was among the first to implement this digital buffer approach. While the buffer is laughably small by today's standards (where PS Audio and Boulder just rip the whole CD into RAM), the product is remarkably effective. The Airport Express is hugely improved by having its toslink output reclocked by the Lens, and then sent via coax to the Levinson.

I'd describe the difference as making the sound much less "hi-fi," much more life-like. But it's not subtle -- the Airport direct into the Levinson was obviously less involving, obviously less dimensional. From the Lens, it's very close to the sound of the Levinson reading direct from the CD. The same? Not sure yet. But very close, at minimum.

So the Airport -> Lens -> Levinson as good as the Airport -> Benchmark? Stay tuned -- haven't done that comparison yet.

[cat6man]

very nice............i'm looking for a re-clocker to follow my network streaming box (currently have ziova cs615 network media player)..............my ziova can stream hi-rez audio over spdif but can't do gapless playback unfortunately.

the logitech duet does gapless streaming but can't output hi-rez audio, only
red book

pace-car is interesting but not a cheap solution..............hoping to see some lower cost re-clockers in the next year

anyone know of a diy combining a buffer and a super/ultra clock?

[feckn_eejit]

Necro-posting here to report that a local buddy and I are each running this same setup (him with a Pass Labs D1 DAC and me with a Sonic Frontiers SFD-2 Mk.III, with a D2D-1 in the mix as well upsampling to 24/96) with absolutely fabulous results. For me, the benchmark transport was a Levinson No.37, which didn't seem to benefit from running through the lens itself, but the Airport Express is transformed from what I found to be unenjoyable to essentially the same level as the No.37.

Thanks to the AE/Lens, with my iPhone for control using the Remote app, I'm done spinning discs and they can be safely stored for archival purposes. I'm in love with the setup and it's ridiculously convenient with zero drawback.

Awesome!

[timb5881]

That if a cd is ripped on to the hard drive useing EAC , the play back is better than a cd player or transport that does not use a ram buffer ( like the PWT by PS Audio). The reason being that more often than not, a cd player/transport is useing error correction often while reading the data. A computer file is already bit perfect if ripped with EAC. Reading files from a hard drive is bit perfect. Jitter reduction is the only thing that needs to be done after that and before the DAC.

[feckn_eejit]

I had the same theory, and tested with a few digital transports feeding an RME HDSPe AIO sound card through the S/PDIF coaxial interface, both with and without the Digital Lens in the picture.

I ripped a track using EAC to a .wav file. I then used Cool Edit to record the same waveform from each of the transports, both with and without the digital lens.

I painstakingly trimmed all digital zero off the start and end of each recorded file to match the ripped file, and then ran each recorded .wav file against the ripped file using Cool Edit's Compare Wave function.

Curiously, without the Lens between the transport and S/PDIF input of the sound card, all the results were slightly different!

With the lens in the picture, most of the transports produced results identical to the .wav extracted using accurate mode EAC. The one that didn't has always sounded extremely different and I can only determine is broken.

I actually tried the Airport Express through the Lens into the sound card as well during the same test - it too performed perfectly. I didn't try it toslink directly into the sound card, think it was around 5am at that point and I was kinda done with the experiment :)