Musiland "Digital Times" 24/192 PCI card (digital output only)

very nice! but does it have the new improved FPGA that offers instant "high precision" sample rates?

and does it use the generic VIA drivers? these are meant for the chinese market, so getting technical infos is pretty tedious..

PS: it doesn't seem to be in the list: http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/443786/musiland-monitor-02-us/600#post_6624136

yes, but how many gates? the old FPGA has 50K, the new one has 250K.

It's got a VIA chipset, so it's most likely using the VIA generic drivers....I think Musiland can do better than that! We need a Monitor 03 w/ the 250K gates FPGA

ok, so we got the proprietary drivers, but no trace of "high precision"/"auto SR" modes or 250K FPGA..if anyone feels like playing the guinea pig

Still 2 dcm, so no fast switching between 44.1 family and 48K family. You need at least 4 dcm to handle both families without reloading the dcm coefficients. Musiland does have a high-end PCI card with the 250K gate fpga and 4 dcms

I'm nowhere near an expert like glt(what's a DCM anyway? )...the only thing I can say is that over toslink my PCM1793/CS8414 Firestone Spitfire DAC glitches up if it doesn't get SPOT-ON sample rates...and I read some ppl saying in the Musiland topic that before those "high precision" drivers came up, the "44.1" indicator on their DAC simply wouldn't light up.

This problem has been explained thoroughly here on glt's blog: http://hifiduino.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-are-clocks-generated-in-musiland.html

so I've had those real world experiments:

-a card w/ a 48Mhz PLL that played 48kHz fine, but going 48>44.1 right away would give very glitchy sound for a few secs. Waiting a few secs before going 48 > 44.1 would only make a brief glitch before each song...and it'd do the same glitch for each 44.1 song anyway.

-a card w/ a 18Mhz PLL that plays 44.1 fine but 48/96 always give a slight "pop" before each song..the built-in clocking prolly takes a few milliseconds to reach 48/96000,00 ?

-a card w/ 2 clocks(one for 44.1, one for 48), that would always glitch up on all frequencies.

It's pretty obvious that I need a card w/ spot-on sample rates..the Musiland in "high precision" mode look like good candidates.

if you check the end of this paper, m2tech explains that many cards don't output spot-on sample rates and that you might have never heard your music at the right pitch...hence you've been listening to slightly out of tune instruments: http://www.m2tech.biz/public/pdf/White%20Paper%20on%20hiFace.pdf

now I think my DAC only has this problem over toslink, so coax might not "glitch" up...I've got two friends running a Spitfire in coax and they don't get any glitch, but one of them runs an hiface

Originally Posted by ironmine 

Leeperry, 

Does M-Audio Audiophile 192 have all the above?

The only thing I can say is that the Audiophile 24/96 PCI has 2 PLL's, and the USB version only one. the PCI is older I think(it's written in big on their PCB), not sure about the 192. But the musiland in "high precision" mode and the hiface seem hard to beat for spot-on sample rates.

hehe, even in "high precision" mode the musiland are still not quite there: http://hifiduino.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/reading-sample-rate/

@glt: I wonder if you could also run this test on the hiface?

check my link above on glt's blog, even the musiland fall short

I wonder how the hiface would do....otherwise there's always the option of old RME/Lynx cards, these supposedly have killer clocking!