[801evan]

I have my doubts if multi stranded optical is better than single ones.

Ok thinner strands shorten the inner reflected travel distance of the signal forcing a more straight line.. but on the other side the signal arrives a multitude of times slightly different in time with each strand that may confuse the receiver side.

Longer cables give bigger timing differences than short ones. And bending amplifies this further

I played alot with optical cables with my AK120 DAP that didnt accepted 192khz with some cables .. and landed with a €25 0.5m Audioquest forest single stranded cable.

Ironically my 6 ft optical cable sounds better than the 3 feet one. My guess is less bending overall to make the connection happen.

 

[chesebert]

@Rob Watts I am sorry to disappoint you but music reproduction is not a scientific instrument test, what sounds good to me is correct. I buy gear that sounds good.

On the battery power supply, that was the FOTM back when and bunch of people jumped on it and almost everyone has gotten off the hype train. For practical reasons, lead acid battery needs to be charged and discharged and it sucks to wait for battery to charge when you want to listen. Also sucks when the battery needs to be changed eventually. Having a couple big lead acid batteries in the house is also not safe as some of them do leak. The sound is at best different and not clear improvements in all areas - improve in some areas and deficient in others.

I suggest Chord just license an SMP from another British brand that works well instead of having customers spend thousands on some aftermarket power supply.

 

[endless402]

Optical should always be considered the reference (best) input. Depending upon the source and your system, you may find USB is as good as optical, or it's not as good when it will sound brighter with degraded depth performance.

Source jitter is removed by my DPLL, as this acts like a buffer, where the data is taken out from the buffer via an FPGA low jitter derived clock that is frequency locked (not phase locked) to the incoming data. Thus source jitter is eliminated, as the data is processed by the local 104.25 MHz low jitter clock.

Agree. Everyone should test the different outputs of their source and choose the one they like the best. On my source I preferred aes over optical, coaxial and usb.

 

[chesebert]

@Rob Watts On to optical, while in theory optical is superior to physical connection (except for Ethernet) due to true galvanic isolation, in practice optical is perhaps one of the worst if transmitting spdif signal compared to BNC or AES, assuming all else being equal.

I am going to borrow someone explanation because I am too lazy to type. S/PDIF is a horrendously poorly designed interface. This is because it combines the clock and audio coding onto the same signal. The receiver is supposed to recover the clock from this signal as well as extract the audio data. This turns out to be a non-trivial task, and one that almost always leaves the recovered clock contaminated with signal correlated jitter artefacts. So any clock you transmit over an S/PDIF connection that is also carrying audio signals will probably be worse than any internal clock.

Having said that if you are transmitting purely digital signal like fiber, then it’s great.

 

[801evan]

Optical has solved a lot of my issues in my chain and made me simply stick to 44.1.

Part of the illusion that higher fs is better is because most likely you'll need USB to prove that and with USB, higher fs simply fills the frames faster so that the USB protocol can send it out sooner than later. This is enough to make a difference.

Spdif is a constant stream and this may partly be the reason for it's superiority.

 

[Roybenz]

Well i can restate the tests i have made :
Dave from Naim555 with psu (30k streamer) using usb vs Node2i(300 euro streamer) using coax since it had no usb : small difference like you describe,but i can easily attribute that to no galvanic isolation on the coax.
Auralic Vega G1 streaming to itself off Tidal vs my Macbook pro 16 streaming to it via usb .Sounded absolutely identical. You would think sound doesn't get any "purer " than a dac streaming to itself.
Multiple tests on the old dac ,laptop vs desktop and jitterbug-same conclusion.
There's no Innuous dealer here unfortunately, just Auralic. I'll loan an Aries G1 at some point.That should be an obvious difference. My current dealer sells a ton of brands, but not a lot of streamers. Might be a reason for that, don't know.
I'm not on some crusade against streamers, if something can make Dave sound better for a reasonable amount i'm all for it. At the moment they just seem to be over-engineered neutered pcs .
That Taiko extreme streamer is a joke if you ask me. Just because the bom adds up to 10-15k, doesn't mean it's a good product. Even if differences were so cataclysmic.
What i can't wrap my head around is if this streamer companies are so ahead of the curve and claim to fix everyone's dacs, why not make dacs themselves?

I’m trying to figure this streamer thing out, I tried a-b for 2 days with qobuz Altair g1- xlr-moon 430had vs my iMac-qobuz-usb-moon 430had. There was no difference. Impossible to pick one out in a blind test.

Considering getting the Vega g1 which is supposed to be better than Altair g1, but I’m afraid i won’t be able to hear any difference with that either.

 

[adrianm]

I’m trying to figure this streamer thing out, I tried a-b for 2 days with qobuz Altair g1- xlr-moon 430had vs my iMac-qobuz-usb-moon 430had. There was no difference. Impossible to pick one out in a blind test.

Considering getting the Vega g1 which is supposed to be better than Altair g1, but I’m afraid i won’t be able to hear any difference with that either.

It depends on a lot of things. Differences are so subtle, 2 years after that post i still wonder if i’m crazy sometimes . With Xlr and usb you’re still not isolating the electrical noise so it makes sense there won’t be much difference .Optical vs anything else is the most obvious.
I would also say power filtering might also be a factor that would make those differences “pop” even more.

 

[endless402]

For my system, I had Aq diamond optical, usb and aes. I also had a shunyata aes and esoteric bnc.

When comparing the aq cables (because I wanted to be consistent), aes was the best and optical was the worse. Optical was more dynamic but much more fatiguing because the highs were too bright.
Usb was also bright sounding on the highs but wasn’t as fatiguing.
Aes was the best for me.
Everything is ymmv because my source has an oxco clock on aes and coaxial.

 

[Reactcore]

in practice optical is perhaps one of the worst if transmitting spdif signal compared to BNC or AES, assuming all else being equal.

All true.

But as i understood.. Rob's dac's do actually reclock buffer stored data inside.

Like filling a sandwalker with horrendous varying speeds.. but through the narrow hole the sand flows out with steady speed.

So eliminated the jitter leaves only the benefit of optical: being best RF isolation

 

[chesebert]

All true.

But as i understood.. Rob's dac's do actually reclock buffer stored data inside.

Like filling a sandwalker with horrendous varying speeds.. but through the narrow hole the sand flows out with steady speed.

So eliminated the jitter leaves only the benefit of optical: being best RF isolation

But Chord is still using PLL to drive the clock distribution in the dac. So garbage in garbage out. If your clock is contaminated from getting muxed with data, it doesn't matter how good your PLL is you will still get error in the clock. The only solution to this is to use external clock and drive both the transport and the dac using the same master clock. The best solution is to avoid spdif encoding in the first place.

Forgot to mention the FIFO "buffer" you mentioned. I am sure Chord buffers the data and reclocks it out, but it's the same "damaged" clock from the spdif signal from the PLL output.

 

[801evan]

I’m trying to figure this streamer thing out, I tried a-b for 2 days with qobuz Altair g1- xlr-moon 430had vs my iMac-qobuz-usb-moon 430had. There was no difference. Impossible to pick one out in a blind test.

Considering getting the Vega g1 which is supposed to be better than Altair g1, but I’m afraid i won’t be able to hear any difference with that either.

You are upgrading the wrong thing at the wrong time if this is the case. There's a bigger bottleneck, weak link somewhere else.

 

[Roybenz]

It depends on a lot of things. Differences are so subtle, 2 years after that post i still wonder if i’m crazy sometimes . With Xlr and usb you’re still not isolating the electrical noise so it makes sense there won’t be much difference .Optical vs anything else is the most obvious.
I would also say power filtering might also be a factor that would make those differences “pop” even more.

The store said it was best to use the balanced xlr, they gave me Midas reference to try. I also have a isotek power filter. For usb i use heimdall 2.

 

[Rob Watts]

But Chord is still using PLL to drive the clock distribution in the dac. So garbage in garbage out. If your clock is contaminated from getting muxed with data, it doesn't matter how good your PLL is you will still get error in the clock. The only solution to this is to use external clock and drive both the transport and the dac using the same master clock. The best solution is to avoid spdif encoding in the first place.

Forgot to mention the FIFO "buffer" you mentioned. I am sure Chord buffers the data and reclocks it out, but it's the same "damaged" clock from the spdif signal from the PLL output.

Its clear you have no idea what you are talking about.

There are no PLLs within Chord DACs, there exists only one clock which is fixed and very low jitter, and this clock drives the entire digital audio path.

 

[chesebert]

Its clear you have no idea what you are talking about.

There are no PLLs within Chord DACs, there exists only one clock which is fixed and very low jitter, and this clock drives the entire digital audio path.

Alright, how are you recovering the clock from the spdif signal?

I note you wrote this yourself: "Because video is very important to me, I wanted a system that would eliminate the PLL SQ problems, and so I developed the DPLL system that you can find on all my DAC's - and it took many years to perfect." As far as I am aware, DPLL is still PLL.

Also, if I am wrong, you can tell me the correct answer. Not sure if this type of response is good marketing...I suppose some appreciate this communication style.

 

[AnakChan]

I’ve cleaned up this thread deleting posts of about burn in/break in, etc. Please stay on course to the subject of this thread.