13-Mar-2015, 23:01
(13-Mar-2015, 22:43)Confused Wrote: This being the Aurender thread leads to the question of why Aurender on many of it's models chooses to use exclusive USB 2 output, rather than SPDIF or AES/EBU. Is USB technically superior if implimented properly? Of is USB used to achieve maximum compatibility with DACs which are primarily designed for use with computers, hence USB compatible?
As I understand it, asynchronous USB should in principle be superior to AES/EBU from a clocking point of view, because the DAC can use its own, highly stable clock rather than having to recover it from the input stream (e.g. with a phase-locked loop). Also USB provides much more robust error detection capabilities, although for isochronous transfers used by audio devices there is no automatic re-transmission mechanism to support error recovery.
Against that, you might argue that USB could be more prone to injecting noise into sensitive analog circuits, if not dealt with carefully.
So USB should perhaps give both better sound quality and wider compatibility than AES/EBU. In practice it'll still depend on good engineering (like the obsessive attention to detail in the totalDAC devices), so I'd hesitate to generalise...
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