royewest
100+ Head-Fier
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- Jan 1, 2005
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Quote:
I've had very mixed results with USB.
When it works it's of course indistinguishable from other digital sources of equivalent bandwidth, etc. But I have often had pops and interruptions and other noises when feeding a DAC via USB, which I believe to be due to buffer underflows and interruptions to the digital stream from other operating system and application tasks, even under very light load. I've experienced this on a series of beefy Windows laptops (fast newish ThinkPads with plenty of RAM, etc.) over several years, with a series of versions of XP and several players, with and without ASIO4ALL, etc. I put too much time into this and finally gave up and switched to a Mac, running XP in a VM for work and iTunes on the OS X side for music.
I chose the Ultra Micro DAC about a year ago because it has an optical in.
Originally Posted by Tyll Hertsens /img/forum/go_quote.gif Yeah, USB works pretty well though, plenty good for a portable rig. |
I've had very mixed results with USB.
When it works it's of course indistinguishable from other digital sources of equivalent bandwidth, etc. But I have often had pops and interruptions and other noises when feeding a DAC via USB, which I believe to be due to buffer underflows and interruptions to the digital stream from other operating system and application tasks, even under very light load. I've experienced this on a series of beefy Windows laptops (fast newish ThinkPads with plenty of RAM, etc.) over several years, with a series of versions of XP and several players, with and without ASIO4ALL, etc. I put too much time into this and finally gave up and switched to a Mac, running XP in a VM for work and iTunes on the OS X side for music.
I chose the Ultra Micro DAC about a year ago because it has an optical in.