http://uptoneaudio.com/products/usb-regen
Evillamer, I stand corrected. Regen and Wyrd are in the same class.
There is a difference though and it was debated over at compAudiophile.
Here is one thread:
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f8-general-forum/schiit-wyrd-universal-serial-bus-industry-standard-cables-connectors-and-communications-protocols-between-computers-and-electronic-devices-decrappifier-22085/index2.html
Exceprt here
Superdad
John Swenson and I have been working on a similar product (since before the Wyrd was announced)--with the same SMSC hub chip even. But we use much better regulators, a better clock, proper impedance matching with a 4-layer board--and especially key is that it is tiny enough to not need a USB cable on the output, it plugs into the DAC with just a male>male A>B adapter.
I still applaud them for bringing out the Wyrd. I can't put schiit in a box to sell for $99 and make any money. Those guys have my respect for all of what they do!
Oh, here is a pic of our little toy just to prove I'm not blowing smoke:
Attachment 15217
AND
Originally Posted by
Jimmypowder
So what's the difference between the Regen and Schiit Decrapifier?
They are both reclockers , right ?
So how is this an innovative product?
Fill me in .
The Wyrd and the regen are conceptually similar from an upper level standpoint, they are very different in implementation and motivation for the development.
From reading what Schiit has posted it seems that their motivation was providing a clean power supply and secondly regenerating the data, whereas my motivation was providing the highest signal quality I could, and secondly providing very clean power.
Some of the differences are:
The regen has a much lower jitter clock feeding the hub chip, which will provide lower jitter on the data.
The regen uses a 4 layer board, primarily to allow a proper impedance match. With a standard thickness 2 layer board it is impossible to attain a proper impedance match to the hub chip. The pins on the chip are small and close together, this necessitates very thin board traces, with a two layer board the distance between ground plane and these traces (BTW this is called a differential micro-strip configuration) produce an impedance that is much greater than the spec. With a four layer board the ground plane can be much closer to the top layer which allows for appropriate impedance with the very narrow traces. The regen also uses SMD USB jacks which allow for appropriate trace width and spacing to continue the impedance matching through to the USB jacks. The result of this is that there will be very minimal reflections at the regen side. Even if the DAC does not have good impedance matching (which is pretty common) which WILL cause a reflection at the DAC end, it will be absorbed at the regen because of the proper impedance matching.
The regen has a frequncy optimized Power Delivery network (PDN), which turns out to make a very significant improvement in SQ. This is quite a technical subject, WAY beyond what I can post here, but here is the mile high summary:
In order to properly respond to the load variations of what the supply is powering, it needs to have a low impedance over a very broad range of frequencies. For digital audio this is from low Hz to hundreds of Mhz range. The entire supply flow from mains AC to board layout and capacitors on the board play a role in getting this right.
The regen is what got me focusing in on this. I was testing the first prototype and was seeing some noise on the supply right at the hub chip power pins that shouldn't be there. After a lot of detective work I traced it down to some frequency ranges of the PDN that were much higher impedance than they should be. I included a fix for this in the second version. With this I couldn't detect the noise any more, and it sounded much better, but Alex was still not super thrilled with the SQ. I then did a mathematical analysis of the PDN and found another frequency range that had a higher impedance than it should, made a fix for this, and sent the result to Alex, he was thrilled, this was much better than anything he had heard before.
This process of frequency optimizing the PDN is something that is done in expensive high speed network equipment, but is almost never done in consumer products, especially audio equipment. But the experience with the regen seems to point to this being quite important for digital audio. I have subsequently tried some of this on some DACs and seen marked improvement in SQ, so it looks like this might be a significant area to look into.
The whole reason I started thinking about a regen was the USB cable threads, after a lot of experimentation and thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that the signal integrity at the DAC was what was probably the difference between cables. Thus a device designed to regenerate the data signals. Because the whole purpose was to regenerate the signals that the cables were messing up, the regen device had to be right at the input to the DAC, thus it needed to be small and low weight.
One un-anticipated benefit to the frequency optimized PDN, is that the noise on the VBUS output is much less sensitive to load transients than other implementations. So if the DAC IS bus powered, that brings even more improvement.
Well there it is, the primary reasons the regen hasa better implementation than other devices.
John S.
