USB to SPDIF converters shoot-out : EMU 0404 USB vs. Musiland Monitor 01 USD vs. Teralink-x vs. M2Tech hiFace

[reverendo]

Has anybody ever tried a Blue Circle Thingee? Any comparisons?
Thanks a lot in advance
best regards
André

 

[Lil' Knight]

Looks like M2Tech has an US authorized dealer (http://www.tweekgeek.com/). I sent them an email asking the availability and they pointed to TweekGeek. Hopefully they have the hiFace in stock. That way I won't have to deal with long international shipping.

Anyone tried the Belden digital BNC cables that BJC is offering? I think they have 3 or 4 different types, not sure which would work best.

 

[tosehee]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lil' Knight /img/forum/go_quote.gif Looks like M2Tech has an US authorized dealer (http://www.tweekgeek.com/). I sent them an email asking the availability and they pointed to TweekGeek. Hopefully they have the hiFace in stock. That way I won't have to deal with long international shipping. Anyone tried the Belden digital BNC cables that BJC is offering? I think they have 3 or 4 different types, not sure which would work best.

Just bought 18' BNC cable that BJC recommended. I honestly can't tell the difference between this and Canare one that audio-gd ships with.

That's just me though. Some people swear by the length of BNC that makes the audible difference.

 

[slim.a]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lil' Knight /img/forum/go_quote.gif Anyone tried the Belden digital BNC cables that BJC is offering? I think they have 3 or 4 different types, not sure which would work best.

I have the Belden 1694A Digital Audio Cable (BNC) and I found that it performs very good in comparison to similarly priced digital cables (budget cables such as Canare and Belkin Silver Series). However it doesn't reach the performance of a high performance digital cable such as the Stereovox XV2 (in my setup).

By the way, it just happened that I read an article where the reviewer tried a few spdif cables (review here). I copied below an extract from the review.

"For digital S/PDIF coax cables, well where to start? I have the following to try and naturally they all sound different in some way or another (again more on this later): PAD Aqueous ($650), Blue Jean (Belden 1694A - $15), Moon Audio Black Dragon ($170), Canare Digiflex Gold 2 ($40), and a Signal Cable (also I believe based on the Belden 1694A - $30). All work fine and all will get you there in one way or another. The PAD is considerably more refined and dimensional, the Moon Audio is fast and clean, and the others fall into the "gets the job done with little to complain about" camp. For the money the Belden stuff is quite good. The Canare is somewhat muted and diffuse, lacking to a great degree, when compared against the others here, musical resolution. Odd as the Canare used to be an industry favorite. Well, time moves on… it ain't bad, just not as good as the others."

 

[Andrew_WOT]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lil' Knight /img/forum/go_quote.gif Looks like M2Tech has an US authorized dealer (http://www.tweekgeek.com/). I sent them an email asking the availability and they pointed to TweekGeek. Hopefully they have the hiFace in stock. That way I won't have to deal with long international shipping. Anyone tried the Belden digital BNC cables that BJC is offering? I think they have 3 or 4 different types, not sure which would work best.

M2Tech | HiFace USB to SPDIF | HiFace USB to BNC
Availability - mid November

 

[Lil' Knight]

Quote:

Originally Posted by tosehee /img/forum/go_quote.gif Just bought 18' BNC cable that BJC recommended. I honestly can't tell the difference between this and Canare one that audio-gd ships with. That's just me though. Some people swear by the length of BNC that makes the audible difference.

How does length affect the sound of BNC cable? Longer or shorter will sound better? I don't think I'd need anything longer than 2.5ft.

 

[erin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by slim.a /img/forum/go_quote.gif Hi erin, Out of curiosity, have you tried different usb cables ?

Hi Slim,

I have only tried a generic 3 meter cable from the computer shop, and after reading a few reviews i thought that i would give the Belkin F3U133-10 USB cable a try. It is a 1 meter cable. I found that the Belkin did sound different to the generic cable. But im not sure if this is due to it being a 1 meter cable vs. a three meter cable. Or becuase the Belkin has superior construction or shielding or something? So i agree that different brands of USB sound different. I prefer the sound of the Belkin, i think all aspects of the music sound a little better. In Australia access to "high end" USB cables is quite limited so i dont really have the opportunity to demo the "high end" USB cables often discussed on this and other Hi Fi forums. Although i would like to, but the price jump from Belkin to the next level up is quite steep, and its a bit scary to commit to buying these cables without an audition.
What do you advise?

Thanks

 

[erin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by regal /img/forum/go_quote.gif Ha Ha, I even offered him a free linear power supply, but he has a different wall power than we do in the USA. I have faith he will comeup with something, maybe build one from AMB or the other guy (forget his name), don't use a switching power supply. It makes a huge difference.

Hello Regal ,

Anyway, funny that you say not to use a switching power supply as i mainly use a SMPS to power the Teralink. The SLA battery does sound better than the SMPS to me, but I still think the SMPS sounds noticeably better than using the USB power supply. I have also tried a linear PS and prefer in this order at this point in time:
1) 12V SLA battery
2) SMPS 12V 400ma
3) 12V Linear power supply
4) USB power

I can hear a difference to the sound when running each of these Power supplies. I mostly use the SMPS becuase the SLA battery needs charging every 6 hours of use and i cant leave it plugged in all the time LOL.

 

[erin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jsplice /img/forum/go_quote.gif This may be related to some type of electrical noise, since the desktop has A/C power coming into it. With a laptop, you either run off the battery, or the A/C is converted to D/C externally. Very interesting findings though.

Since we are sort of on the subject, and not meaning to hijack the thread, but I use the i2s output of the Teralink into my dac, and personally i am an i2s convert as i have compared i2s to spdif and prefer everything about i2s to digital recivers i have heard DIR9001 which i think sounds too dry, and CS8412 which i like - its quite musical, and CS8414, but i2s has great tone and timing and details and i think it sounds closer to analog equipment whereas to me SPDIF recivers can still sound a bit digital (take that to mean what you want) I only use 44.1khz as i dont like the sound of upsampling and digital sounds great with my setup.
I use the Cmp + Cplay program to listen to music, to me the sound of this program is far superior to foobar with asio or ds and supposedly this is becuase it reduces to OS jitter ( coming back to the topic) - and this reduces electrical noise from the processor. I have optimised my PC according to the website as much as i can whilst still allowing me to use it for general PC tasks.
for those interested, link to Cplay website: cMP² | Main / HomePage

thanks

 

[slim.a]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lil' Knight /img/forum/go_quote.gif How does length affect the sound of BNC cable? Longer or shorter will sound better? I don't think I'd need anything longer than 2.5ft.

You can find here an interesting article about why sometimes a longer spdif cable can sound better than a short one. To sum up, longer cables can avoid reflection in certain situations (impedance mismatch, ...) but it depends on too many factors to predict in a reliable manner.

So, there is no way to know for sure how a given digital cable will interact with the rest of your equipement. by the way, I was wondering the same before getting the hiface unit, and I asked Marco from m2tech about which cable he recommends and he said that it was system dependant.

If price is not an issue, I guess you should get good results with any cable with lengths above 2m/6ft.
In my case, I have a 18ft. Belden cable but I bought a short 1 meter Stereovox bnc cable because of cost concerns : the 2m cable was almost double the price.

 

[slim.a]

Quote:

Originally Posted by erin /img/forum/go_quote.gif Hi Slim, I have only tried a generic 3 meter cable from the computer shop, and after reading a few reviews i thought that i would give the Belkin F3U133-10 USB cable a try. It is a 1 meter cable. I found that the Belkin did sound different to the generic cable. But im not sure if this is due to it being a 1 meter cable vs. a three meter cable. Or becuase the Belkin has superior construction or shielding or something? So i agree that different brands of USB sound different. I prefer the sound of the Belkin, i think all aspects of the music sound a little better. In Australia access to "high end" USB cables is quite limited so i dont really have the opportunity to demo the "high end" USB cables often discussed on this and other Hi Fi forums. Although i would like to, but the price jump from Belkin to the next level up is quite steep, and its a bit scary to commit to buying these cables without an audition. What do you advise? Thanks

Hi erin,

Most of the usb cables I own are between 1.5m and 2m and yet I can hear differences between them, so I guess that what you heard is not only due to the difference in lenght but also to other factors (shielding, conductor material, dielectric, ...), in my opinion.

I tried many usb cables before buying the Wireworld Ultraviolet USB among which different versions of Belkin (Gold series, regular, ...), Monster Cable and Real Cable USB (a french brand). They all sounded different with strengths and weaknesses.
It was until I bought the Ultraviolet usb that I stopped looking for a new usb cable, its sound was cleaner, faster, more spacious and less "digital" than any other usb cable I had tried.

However, since I haven't compared the Wireworld ultraviolet usb cable to similarly priced or higher cables (Kimber, Locus Design, ...), I don't know if it is a great value cable (or not). All I can say is that the improvement it brought to my system was worth the asking price (£48). In fact, I spent even more than that trying different cheaper usb cables (monster, belkin gold, ...) which brought only sideway improvements (different sounding to each other but no clear winner).

 

[tosehee]

slim.a

Why would you use the usb cable when you can hook directly to your pc through hiface?

also, little off topic here, but what's special about foobar 0.8.3 over 0.9.6.9?

 

[nick_charles]

Quote:

Originally Posted by slim.a /img/forum/go_quote.gif You can find here an interesting article about why sometimes a longer spdif cable can sound better than a short one. To sum up, longer cables can avoid reflection in certain situations (impedance mismatch, ...) but it depends on too many factors to predict in a reliable manner. .

Dan Lavry trashed that argument on his discussion board on the PSW forum, he suggests that shorter is always better

PSW Recording Forums: Dan Lavry => Why longer is generally better for an S/PDIF Digital Cable

For some actual sense about cables try..

PSW Recording Forums: Dan Lavry => cables - facts and fiction

 

[tosehee]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nick_charles /img/forum/go_quote.gif Dan Lavry trashed that argument on his discussion board on the PSW forum, he suggests that shorter is always better PSW Recording Forums: Dan Lavry => Why longer is generally better for an S/PDIF Digital Cable For some actual sense about cables try.. PSW Recording Forums: Dan Lavry => cables - facts and fiction

So, for 10', 10 awg copper cable is the good enough?

 

[nick_charles]

Quote:

Originally Posted by tosehee /img/forum/go_quote.gif So, for 10', 10 awg copper cable is the good enough?

Comfortably, I use 12 gauge for my 12' runs.