Quote: Originally Posted by Tyll Hertsens I'm not sure when/if we'll be publishing measurements; I'll look into that a bit for you. I do know that when I saw the measurements of the prototype the distortion and noise measurements were astonishingly low. I didn't necessarily mean...

I couldn't find another thread discussing this new product. At a glance this looks like it will have some exceptional performance. It seems to me that the DAC chip from ESS raises the bar on distortion performance. And does so at a very low power consumption. The white-paper on their site was...

Quote: Originally Posted by rueyloon do does it mean a DAC/Amp with an optical input will always beat a Amp through line out only ? how much difference does this "connection" makes ? if all this discussion is only about the effect on 5% of the performance it is moot to me, but if it...

Quote: Originally Posted by linuxworks stop arguing about theory that you probably don't understand. jitter on usb is a red herring. I understand jitter theory just fine. What I don't know much about though, is the implementation details on how S/PDIF and USB are implemented...

In general, USB has much more jitter than optical. Jitter is random variation in the timepoint at which new data arrives. Correct data at the wrong time equals incorrect data at the right time, resulting in a lower signal-to-noise ratio. Stereophile has done many measurements on DACs with both...

I use a recabled HD650 with Headroom's Balanced Max Amp, and I'm very pleased with that. I haven't heard any of the other amps mentioned in this thread, though.