What do you sueggest me to improve the sound of my chain? Surface book 3 - R11 - ZMF Aeolus
It is quite a list.
1. Lay down power cables close, the best is to tie cables together. Smaller surface area between power cables produce less EMI. Use
ferrite clamps on power cables, clamped on both (not individual).
2. Do your laptop has 2-bolt power plug, so you can reverse position of live/neutral terminals? Try it, you will typically notice that touching metal parts give hears on your hand feeling some electrical leak. Chose a one position that is giving a smaller 'brushing'. It is usually linked to a better sound quality. Check it with all other devices disconnected from the laptop (R2R-11, external monitors, printers)
3. Check whether working on a battery (with power supply unplugged) gives better sound (probably not), it is fine. But if it is worse then EMI is present in a space, think about grounding both cases to one point, but it is not what I would recommend on the beginning.
4. Use a short USB cable, only as required, no excess lenght. Quality of a cable matters (double shielding), but not neccessary an audiophile type.
5. Use
ferrite clamps on the USB cable. Ordinary clamps, not an expensive audiophile type like TDK. Attach one on the A-type plug side or two on both sides of the cable.
6. USB 3.x ports are very noisy. Your laptop has no USB 2.0 ports. Better use ports that have no UPB-PD (power delivery feature) or is disabled in BIOS.
7. Get a small USB 2.0 multiport hub, use it only for a DAC. Any multiport 2.0 hub. If you want to attach more devices (like keyboard/mouse), you must find one with multi-translator processing. In some cases using self-powered hub helps, but it is changing a flow of ground loops, it require more testing.
8. Avoid USB cleaners/isolators/regenerators. Not proven to be effective on modern USB receivers in general and can break the optimal USB transfer mode that Amanero is using. See #9 for explanation.
9. Current Amanero drivers use unusual bulk transfer mode, the same as during reading/writing to the external hard drives. I discovered it very recently when troubleshooting after being hit by a power surge. It requires more comment. A transfer mode is different in principle to the "isochronous asynchronous mode" commonly used for audio transfers, but in the end result it delivers data stream synchronising speed with a clock residing on the Amanero module. Therefore there is no jitter added to the interface. When Windows buit-in UAC2.0 drivers are used, transfer mode is changing to the same as other modern receivers. When testing both drivers, you will probably find no changes in SQ. This will be confirmation that USB transfer is not affected by a noise at all. When you hear a difference, report back. People frequently look at errors introduced to the data transfer as a cause. It is wrong, transmission errors happen very rare. It is ground loops entering a DAC by a 0V USB wire cause a harmful noise spreading inside a DAC.
