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Topic: Cleaning up USB signal to improve DAC with more hardware? (PC Gamer article)  (Read 13793 times) previous topic - next topic
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Re: Cleaning up USB signal to improve DAC with more hardware? (PC Gamer article)

Reply #26 –
<shrug>

That's meaningless to me unless you can show the -80 dB figure as being audible with even the highest quality releases under anything but unsafe listening levels.

Humor me, though. Where do you draw the line on acceptable performance? On what, exactly was this basis predicated?

Re: Cleaning up USB signal to improve DAC with more hardware? (PC Gamer article)

Reply #27 –
It's loud enough to be annoying as background noise or during silent passages. 

Re: Cleaning up USB signal to improve DAC with more hardware? (PC Gamer article)

Reply #29 –
Quote from: pelmazo on
Quote
With proper power supply filtering and a capacitively coupled output to avoid ground loops it should be fine.
How do you avoid ground loops by capacitive coupling of an audio output?


For a DC powered device like a USB DAC, a coupling capacitor will block out any difference in ground levels, at least in theory.  That is why headphone outputs are commonly capacitively coupled, it means that you don't have to assume that the amp ground is equal to power supply ground.
 

Re: Cleaning up USB signal to improve DAC with more hardware? (PC Gamer article)

Reply #30 –
Quote from: saratoga on
For a DC powered device like a USB DAC, a coupling capacitor will block out any difference in ground levels, at least in theory.  That is why headphone outputs are commonly capacitively coupled, it means that you don't have to assume that the amp ground is equal to power supply ground.
This will prevent damage to the headphones if the source outputs DC, but not fix hum and noise.
"I hear it when I see it."

Re: Cleaning up USB signal to improve DAC with more hardware? (PC Gamer article)

Reply #31 –
Quote from: xnor on
@pelmazo yes, essentially it appears to be a $100 single-port USB "hub" with audiophile power supply. ;)

This positions it as a "Me Too" product cloned from Uptone Audio's Regen at about half the price.   The Regen is a placebophhile  audiophile hit.

Re: Cleaning up USB signal to improve DAC with more hardware? (PC Gamer article)

Reply #32 –
there is this irrational logic that if such product was good for some dude with some specific problem on specific gears, then it will be good for me. when I see people going for that "logic", I only hope they don't do the same thing with medication : / 

Re: Cleaning up USB signal to improve DAC with more hardware? (PC Gamer article)

Reply #33 –
Quote from: castleofargh on
there is this irrational logic that if such product was good for some dude with some specific problem on specific gears, then it will be good for me. when I see people going for that "logic", I only hope they don't do the same thing with medication : / 

To the best of my knowledge, products such as the Uptone Audio Regen are generally evaluated using sighted evaluations. 

For them to work the USB devices being served would seem to need to have poor power supply and data line interference rejection. 

This gets a bit tough (if not self-contradictory)  because the USB data line is one of those digital lines with fairly sharp-edged waves, and it needs to somehow simultaneously passed with the data and sharp edges perfectly  intact, and the device also isolated from them.

Re: Cleaning up USB signal to improve DAC with more hardware? (PC Gamer article)

Reply #34 –
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
For them to work the USB devices being served would seem to need to have poor power supply and data line interference rejection. 

I recently encountered this sequence of thinking:

He thinks he may be a victim of jitter... He buys a gadget, which says "reduces jitter" on the box... His system "sounds better."
Conclusion: It must have been jitter because the "jitter-fixing" box "fixed" it.

There! Biases taking care of the diagnosis as well as the sound! I did not deny his subjective experience, but continued to maintain that there were no real grounds, only assumption, for his whole buzz-word-jitter thing in the first place. But it said jitter-fixer on the box... so it must have fixed jitter  ::)

(and yes, I know about your jitterred example files, and have referred several people to them)
The most important audio cables are the ones in the brain

Re: Cleaning up USB signal to improve DAC with more hardware? (PC Gamer article)

Reply #35 –
Quote from: Thad E Ginathom on

I recently encountered this sequence of thinking:
He thinks he may be a victim of jitter... He buys a gadget, which says "reduces jitter" on the box... His system "sounds better."
Conclusion: It must have been jitter because the "jitter-fixing" box "fixed" it.

There! Biases taking care of the diagnosis as well as the sound!

Jitter fixers have been around for a long time (over 20 years at this time).

I first encountered that alleged logical (what is alleged is that it is logical, its existence is real)) sequence in the late 1990s on rec.audio.opinion.

Ironically, back in the 1990s the digital interfaces in use were  engineered primitively enough that there may have been audible jitter.