A Happy Combination !

[bill]

;D
I added the XDA-1 to my desktop setup this week:

Xonar DX sound card
XDA-1 dac
Grado RA1-HG amp
Sennheiser HD-650 headphones

Everything from HD files to streaming MP3 sounds great. The MP3 is simply amazing for its clarity, detail, and smoothness. There is absolutely no noise. I never knew MP3 could sound this good!

Kudos to Emotiva on a great product.

Cheers,
Bill

[bobbyt]

You may want to try some of your lossless files without the sound card. If you're using USB, the XDA behaves like a sound card. If you have coax (or optical) on your motherboard, then the best case scenario is that your sound card just passes the digital signal straight through unaltered and is irrelevant--and the more likely case is that it fiddles with the signal to resample or mix it.

I'm not sure of the situation for coax, but if you use USB without your sound card you can use kernel streaming to bypass the operating system's mixer and get true bit-perfect audio to the XDA, rather than passing it through several layers of software & hardware.

[bill]

Currently, I'm using the optical output of the sound card as input to the XDA. This connection shows up as an S/PDIF pass through device on my Windows control panel. When I play on of my HD files, Winamp shows it as 192KHz/24 bit. Prior to getting the XDA I was using a Yamaha receiver as a dac. This showed an input sample rate of 192KHz as input on these files.

I am confident that I am getting 192KHz/24 bit input to the XDA. Whether it has been modified in some way by the sound card, I cannot say.

I have tried the USB connection as you suggested. The XDA shows as an audio device on the Windows control panel. In configuring the XDA on the control panel, I'm only offered 44.1KHz/16bit or 48KHz/16 bit as sample rate options when "running in shared mode". I'm not sure what "shared mode" means in this case. I have the "exclusive mode" options checked on the control panel configuration. I don't know if the "exclusive mode" setting overrides the "shared mode" selection or not.

I find it hard to hear any difference listening via USB or optical.

bill

[kellys]

Shared mode is when the Windows sounds are all aggregated and played through the speakers. This way you still hear the clicks and chimes that Windows produces. I believe the shared mode sounds get processed through windows mixer. Exclusive mode will block these sounds when the exclusive player is playing. The only way to get exclusive control of the sound card is with Windows WASAPI interface (Win 7). WASAPI allows a bit perfect output through your optical output. Audiophile players like JRiver and Foobar allow this mode. I notice a subtle improvement in SQ by using Foobar in this way, but it is enough to stop me from using Media Center, which I used to like very much.

Glad to hear you like the new additional to your setup!

[bobbyt]

Shared mode, and I believe DS or "Direct Sound" (despite what its name would indicate), are going through Windows' mixer.

KS or "Kernel Streaming" is synonymous with exclusive mode. An easy way to confirm is to start your music, then launch a video separately, or hop on youtube. You should either not hear the 2nd source at all, or perhaps throw an error since that program won't be able to find a sound device.

If everything sounds great as-is, then great. If you're getting system sounds or other program sounds along with your music, I'd definitely try to run it exclusively (I'm not sure that enabling "exclusive mode" actually puts it in that mode; I think it just lets programs monopolize the sound device if they choose). WASAPI is not the only method; there is also ASIO, and simple kernel streaming (I'm using the latter in Foobar and have confirmed it's exclusive).

Since S/PDIF is giving you 24/192, I'd also try bypassing your (second) sound card by connecting to the coax on your sound card if you have it.

[bill]

I have installed Jriver and Foobar2000 on my PC.

With Jriver, I can get exclusive mode output using either kernel streaming or WASAPI plugins.

With Foobar, I can get exclusive mode with the WASAPI plugin. I can also get exclusive mode with ASIO plugin, but ASIO doesn't support 192KHz sample rate.

From what I understand now, combining exclusive mode output with S/PDIF pass through gives a bit exact data stream to the dac.

Now, I just need to use jriver and foobar for a while to decide which I prefer.

Thanks guys for putting me on to this. I appreciate your help

bill