Really wish these companies would decide on a standard for I2S.
Unless there's some compelling reason to choose something else, let's just go with the PS Audio solution as they seem to be the biggest company involved. Plus they do I2S inputs on their DACs as well as I2S outputs on their transports - nobody else handles both sides like that (though Cayin will join those ranks next year with an I2S capable DAC). Can't imagine anyone sells more units than PS Audio, so let's just call that the standard and go from there.
Wishful thinking I suppose.
I agree with you in principle, but there are quite a lot of technical issues we need to deal with in order to follow a De facto standard. Getting the pin right is only the standard point. An industrial standard is well documented and well supported by popular chipset providers, so it's not whether we want to follow suit, but can be follow suit.
On the other hand, there are so many DACs and/or digital transport that claim to support PS Audio "style" I2S, we simply can't test them all. So the best we can do is to stick with PS Audio products in our testing. We can only sustain our iDAP-6 is compatible with PS Audio DAC, we can't ganurante that we will be compatible with A or B or C DAC even when they claim to conform with PS Audio I2S implementation.
I'll provide a quick update on the I2S compatibility issue with PS Audio DAC and we can continue the discussion from there on.
First of all, let me show everyone two photo:
We have finally received the PS Audio NuWave DSD that we purchased to conduct this testing. We connected the iDAP-6 to NuWave DSD through a HDMI cable, and you should notice the I2S indicator of NuWave DSD has turned on. We connect the output of NuWave DSD to our Audio Precision APx525, so we can be sure that the output from the setup is "normal"
We have tried both 24Bit/192kHz and 1Bit/5.6MHz (DSD128), both files playback faultlessly. We expect the DSD files to hang up or identified some irregularity in due course. Hopefully we'll identify some hint on the cause of compatible problem and work our a solution from there on. Unfortunately the story didn't turn up as expected and we don't have any direction to solve the problem promptly now.
The good news is, the DSD output of iDAP-6 is compatible with at least one PS Audio DAC. We shall investigate any potential issue that can improve compatibility and issue a new firmware ASAP.
On the other hand, we have encountered the following problem during our test:
- Switching between DSD64 and DSD128: obvious pop sound is heard.
- Switching between PCM and DSD format: obvious pop sound is heard
- Switching between various resolution of PCM format: no pop sound is heard.
If someone is using PS Audio DAC in I2S with whatever compatible PS Audio Transport, I want to make sure they don't encounter similar pop sound issue. If this turn out to be a popular problem, we might need to seek help from PS Audio directly.