[Yellowjacket]

Simple enough question.

 

[Jazper]

USB is not limited to 16/44.

usb is 2bit and several Mhz, but it's serial.

And it has nothing to do with decoding of data, it's only a data transport medium

 

[Yellowjacket]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jazper USB is not limited to 16/44. usb is 2bit, but it's serial. And it has nothing to do with decoding of data, it's only a data transport medium

See, now that would be the correct response, but why do I read all these posts where people say "OMG USB might suck compared to TOSLINK because it's only 16/44!!!"?

 

[Jazper]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yellowjacket See, now that would be the correct response, but why do I read all these posts where people say "OMG USB might suck compared to TOSLINK because it's only 16/44!!!"?

I think this a greatly misinterpreted/misunderstood issue.

USB carries data. TOSLINK(shortened to TL in this post) carries data. They are both serial interfaces (USB = universal serial bus). USB is designed for information from devices and it is a shared bus, so it's noisy. TL is an optical medium that requires clocking, whereas USB isn't clocked in the same way (I believe it's packet based). TL is designed for audio, USB is more generic.

Technically USB is better because of the fact that it can usually handle more data than TOSLINK as it is a 2 bit bus, whereas TOSLINK is 1 bit. Don't try to tell me you can get more info across because TOSLINK is optical and it travels at the speed of light, so do electrons on a wire. The difference is that wire has minute amounts of resistance and capacitance, as well as being subject to rfi. We are talking about digital data,(I'm going to be quite blanketing with this) RFI does not affect sound quality to any great extent when the sound data is digital.

The thing that matters most is the dac - the converter that changes the signal from digital to analog for you to hear. All the other parts before that are just to put it into a format for the DAC to handle. With TL the format is more transparent (as in it can go straight to an optical reciever and then be turned into signals that can talk to the DAC) whereas with usb, you require a usb reciever to interpret the usb signals and put it into a format the dac can handle - 2 steps rather than one. That said, because it's an external device you can have higher quality chips than the "basic" usb stuff, so it's all conjecture.


Personally, I think that there would be little difference between a well designed TL based DAC and USB dac.

 

[Yellowjacket]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jazper I think this a greatly misinterpreted/misunderstood issue. USB carries data. TOSLINK(shortened to TL in this post) carries data. They are both serial interfaces (USB = universal serial bus). USB is designed for information from devices and it is a shared bus, so it's noisy. TL is an optical medium that requires clocking, whereas USB isn't clocked in the same way (I believe it's packet based). TL is designed for audio, USB is more generic. Technically USB is better because of the fact that it can usually handle more data than TOSLINK as it is a 2 bit bus, whereas TOSLINK is 1 bit. Don't try to tell me you can get more info across because TOSLINK is optical and it travels at the speed of light, so do electrons on a wire. The difference is that wire has minute amounts of resistance and capacitance, as well as being subject to rfi. We are talking about digital data,(I'm going to be quite blanketing with this) RFI does not affect sound quality to any great extent when the sound data is digital. The thing that matters most is the dac - the converter that changes the signal from digital to analog for you to hear. All the other parts before that are just to put it into a format for the DAC to handle. With TL the format is more transparent (as in it can go straight to an optical reciever and then be turned into signals that can talk to the DAC) whereas with usb, you require a usb reciever to interpret the usb signals and put it into a format the dac can handle - 2 steps rather than one. That said, because it's an external device you can have higher quality chips than the "basic" usb stuff, so it's all conjecture. Personally, I think that there would be little difference between a well designed TL based DAC and USB dac.

I agree with everything you say here, but given that (at least in my opinion) this should be fairly obvious for the majority of Head-Fi'ers, why is the issue ever brought up?

 

[Jazper]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yellowjacket I agree with everything you say here, but given that (at least in my opinion) this should be fairly obvious for the majority of Head-Fi'ers, why is the issue ever brought up?

*Shrugs* misinformation probably

 

[lan]

The generic usb driver which works with some popular USB chip hardware is limited to 16bit 48khz.

M-audio uses their own driver and hardware implmentation which does 24bit 96khz.

If you are using using a computer and did any signal processing e.g volume control, that would benefit from 24bit output.

 

[-ries]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jazper I think this a greatly misinterpreted/misunderstood issue. USB carries data. TOSLINK(shortened to TL in this post) carries data. They are both serial interfaces (USB = universal serial bus). USB is designed for information from devices and it is a shared bus, so it's noisy. TL is an optical medium that requires clocking, whereas USB isn't clocked in the same way (I believe it's packet based). TL is designed for audio, USB is more generic. Technically USB is better because of the fact that it can usually handle more data than TOSLINK as it is a 2 bit bus, whereas TOSLINK is 1 bit. Don't try to tell me you can get more info across because TOSLINK is optical and it travels at the speed of light, so do electrons on a wire. The difference is that wire has minute amounts of resistance and capacitance, as well as being subject to rfi. We are talking about digital data,(I'm going to be quite blanketing with this) RFI does not affect sound quality to any great extent when the sound data is digital. The thing that matters most is the dac - the converter that changes the signal from digital to analog for you to hear. All the other parts before that are just to put it into a format for the DAC to handle. With TL the format is more transparent (as in it can go straight to an optical reciever and then be turned into signals that can talk to the DAC) whereas with usb, you require a usb reciever to interpret the usb signals and put it into a format the dac can handle - 2 steps rather than one. That said, because it's an external device you can have higher quality chips than the "basic" usb stuff, so it's all conjecture. Personally, I think that there would be little difference between a well designed TL based DAC and USB dac.

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