USB->SPDIF: M-Audio Transit or HagUSB?

[Garbz]

Nope it's still obnoxious

The transit has ASIO support I hardly think that the Audiophile would not.

One cripe though is the audiophile's coax output IIRC is not isolated. If used with a dac which does not have isolated inputs you could run into some troubles (sound quality wise).

 

[foo_me]

I had a friend of mine build me a hagusb from the kit version.
Comparing it with the M-Audio Transit that I owned at the time...the hagusb was noticeably better.

 

[gevorg]

Quote:

Originally Posted by foo_me I had a friend of mine build me a hagusb from the kit version. Comparing it with the M-Audio Transit that I owned at the time...the hagusb was noticeably better.

Can you describe what exactly was better? Did you test it with the usb asio driver?

 

[daggerlee]

side question, what effect would populating the Hag with boutique parts have? I have one that I just put the generic, recommended Digikey parts on...I am using it just for USB->SPDIF conversion on a Mac, nothing more.

 

[Garbz]

Well depending on the design it could potentially make things worse

, and this goes for all botique parts. In this case it would have no effect on the output, but there's a chance regulators and the such can be made unstable or resonate (see the diy section where 2 threads on this are running).

 

[stryker]

I recall Pburke telling me that the USB receiver/converter chip in the HagUSB is cheap and inferior to the one in the M-Audio Transit and Audiophile USB. He looked at the schematics. He's somewhat of a USB guru as he's built a few DACs based on the DDDac design that is located here.

Not sure where that falls into your plans. In your case, both converters are powered by the bus voltage of the USB connection, which is allegedly inferior to the separate power supply in something like an M-Audio Audiophile. However, if you want a self-powered solution, I guess that it what you have to go with.

 

[rumatt]

I thought I'd bump this thread to see if there were any more experiences comparing these. I've found very few direct comparisons with anyone saying one sounds better than the other.

Here's one vote for HagUSB sounds better and right above my post there's "M-Audio has a better chip".. but that's all I've found.

Any more direct experiences?

I know HagUSB is 16/48 and M-Audio Audiophile is 24/96. I also know that the Audiophile has external power, but the HagUSB claims to clean up the USB power nicely so it's not a problem.

 

[slwiser]

My vote for 44.1 kHz is the HagUSB with XLR out. This is fairly new and gets away from the issue of impedance mismatching of the regular RCA connection.

But if you have hi-rez music on your computer then you will need something like the USB-Audiophile.

 

[audioengr]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mikechai /img/forum/go_quote.gif But the modded Transit, like the one RedWine Audio and Empirical Audio offer, sound much improved from stock mainly because its powered externally or battery. Price also quadruple though.

The Off-Ramp and Freeway from Empirical Audio are not modded Transits. They are custom board designs by Empirical. And the battery does improve things a bit, but it is not the primary reason that these sound better.

The modded Transit that I sold years ago did sound aLOT better with the battery, but this was because the power subsystem was so poor on the Transit. The power subsystem on the Off-Ramp and Freeway is much better.

Steve N.

 

[xenithon]

As an owner of the above, I must agree. The battery (in my case, the "cheapskates" PBS) is what I would call a tweak. The move from a regular USB interface to the Freeway 2 is a major step-up all its own.

 

[rumatt]

Quote:

Originally Posted by slwiser /img/forum/go_quote.gif My vote for 44.1 kHz is the HagUSB with XLR out.

Well, I don't have a DAC with XLR in, so wouldn't this be kind of silly?

I'm currently thinking that I might as well get the M-audio audiophile, because at least this way I can experiment with foobar SRC upsampling to 24/96. If I don't like it I don't have to use it.

I sort of wish I knew whether I'd be loosing anything compared to the HagUSB, but there don't seem to be a lot of opinions on this.

 

[slwiser]

^Since I have a Lavry with a AES that inputs using the XLR, I want one with a XLR and am willing to sale my HagUSB with the coaxial output. So....if you are game?

I do use my M-Audio USB Audiophile most of the time when feeding files off my computer now. I have some hi-rez tracks that this is the only way for me to feed those into my Lavry. It works very well with a good DAC.