OCXO oscillator input theme

[Confused]

Hi Confused,
what settings are you using in HQPlayer ? I tested it once together with Roon and with the recommended settings it was not very responsive anymore. It took several seconds until the music playback begins. I'm thinking about buying a Zen Stream as it is now finally Roon Ready.
It seems you connect the Zen to the Mutec MC3 via USB. Have you tried to connect via SPDIF ? And what power supply are you using for the Zen ? The included SMPS or something better ?

For a while now I have been using HQPlayer to upsample to 24/192 using poly-sinc-short-mp, NS9.

I very often use HQPlayer together with Roon. Perceptually there is very low latency, you press play, music emerges from the speakers. This set-up has also been 100% stable for me, no dropouts or any other issues, it just works as it should.

I have tried the Zen Stream feeding the MC3+USB by both USB and S/PDIF. Subjectively I can detect very little difference in sound quality between the two. When swapping between the two I did have an almost subconscious feeling that USB was fractionally better, but this is easily within the margins that I could be imagining things.

I leave the Zen and MC3+USB powered up all of the time. One advantage of using USB is that when the system is not being used, there is a sync light on the Mutec that blinks when connected via S/PDIF, but it does not blink if USB is used. The blinking light is a little annoying, so USB wins here for practical reasons.

Later I saw the GoldenSound measurements of the MC3+USB, this indicated that measured performance is slightly better via USB in comparison to S/PDIF. Mindful that I see some practical advantages of using USB, this was good enough for me to stick with USB ever since.

I power the Zen Stream with one of the Paul Hynes SR-4's that I bought to go with my SOtM kit. A nice LPSU no doubt, but it is perhaps worth mentioning that the Zen Stream sounds just fine when powered by the cheap and cheerful SMPS that comes with it. Does the Zen sound better with the Paul Hynes? Maybe, just a tiny bit, but there is not a lot in it to my ears.