Musiland Monitor 01 USD 24/192 USB to SPDIF - Page 3

Does it work without the supplied drivers (as a generic USB audio device)?

I just tested playing a 24/192 flac file in foobar on XP with the Musiland feeding my Cambridge 840C. The 840C shows the input as 20/192. I don't know if that's a foobar quirk or a Musiland problem. Any ideas?

And it does play out of my 840C.

Mik, how does the musiland as a transport compare to your Azur 840c? Have you tried running them both into the dacmagic to compare same music?

I haven't tried that yet. I've mainly been comparing my new Audio-gd dac to my 840C's dac. I'll try a Musiland vs. 840C transport comparison in the next few days.

There are some 24/96 and 24/192 samples available here: High Resolution Music DOWNLOAD services.

So far it sounds as good as the Trends, with the added bonus of supporting higher bit and sampling rates. You don't have to fiddle with asio4all on the Musiland. The Musiland is also smaller, and looks and feels better than the Trends.

That it sounds the same as the Trends at 16/44.1 is actually a good thing in my opinion. I've heard usb audio conversion done poorly as well. For example, the Trends (and Musiland) both sound better converting usb to spdif than does the usb to spdif converter built-in to my DacMagic.

All that and the Musiland is less expensive than the Trends. I can easily recommend it as my favourite usb to spdif converter to date. I can't say whether there will be any issues running it on Vista or Windows 7 though.

Interesting product. Can it support vista 64? If you have to use their drivers than that is a shame.

What about the USB transfer mode? If it is steaming USB audio then it's not much better than spdif. Jitter performance will not be great in other words since USB runs at a multiple of 48MHz, most these USB devices use some PLL to generate 44.1 KHz clocks.

Alowing the transport to control the audio transfer is the proper way to do it. I believe Empirical Audio Off-Ramp does it properly. But then so does Emu 0404 USB. AFAIK M-Audio transit isn't good enough since it is just a simple streaming device like 90% or more of these USB devices.

I am also intrested in this product as it is exactly something i can use to feed sound out of my laptop to the vda2.

The people who have this product i have a couple of questions.

- How much CPU does this use when you are using audio that is being streamed through this device.

- How is the sound quality.. i read the whole thread and i have not read anything specific about sound quality.

- Would like to confirm if it is bit perfect so if you run hd dd or hd dts would it pass through to a reciever...

- Any differences between coax / optical output?

It requires drivers. I don't know of any 24/192 usb audio device that doesn't require drivers. USB 2.0 is required to support 24/192 and there is no native USB 2.0 audio support in any version of Windows.

I assume by "using the transport to control the audio transfer", you mean asynchronous usb. The Emu products do something like that by running in some sort of mass storage device mode using their own drivers. I don't know of any other usb to spdif converter that uses asynchronous mode or something like it. The Empirical Audio devices use adaptive mode at the moment, but that may change later in the year. Last I checked, Wavelength Audio had no plans of making a usb to spdif converter using its asynchronous usb technology. I don't know which usb mode is used by the Musiland, but it is also an $80-ish device that does up to 24/192 over usb and sounds as good as I've heard usb audio sound. If it cost $1000+ I would be disappointed if it didn't use asynchronous usb, but for $80 I'm very happy with it.

Some USB devices can do 24/96 with standard windows drivers. I think that is preferable to a 24/192 device that requires custom drivers.

I'm not 100% sure on all the details, but yes I think I mean asynchronous USB. It is where the USB device controls the flow of music data from the PC, as opposed to the PC streaming music data to the USB device. I've no idea what adaptive mode is.

The only other external device I know of that can output 24/192 spdif is an RME Fireface. Nevermind a 24/192 USB audio device that doesn't require drivers... is there any other USB device at all that can do 24/192 spdif?

Hi,
I just got my Musiland Monitor 01 USD yesterday.
So far I have listened to it for around for around 2 hours and it is much better sounding than the EMU 0404 USB used as transport.
I have tried it with 16/44, 24/88 and 24/96 and it works flawlessly either in foobar or windows media player. (I haven't tried 24/192 since my DAC doesn't support sample rates higher than 96.)

Can this be modded with a word clock input (in place of the crystal) so it could be a slaved transport? That'd be a killer!

I'm slightly tempted to check this out.

any confirmations that it at least works at 44.1/16 on linux?

its possible the device uses standard usb protocols but that it does a firmware download (to the device from the pc) at power-on time. pretty common to suck down firmware via usb for 'extensions' or more updated functionality.

so the fact that it needs xylinx code does not mean it will not work with regular old usb-audio.