Post by Casey Leedom on Oct 1, 2018 12:34:50 GMT -5
So my crazy friend Bill has just spent an absurd amount of money (~$1,500) to replace his Raspberry Pi RoPieee Distribution Roon Bridge solution (~$65) feeding into his Teac NT-503 DAC with an SOtM sMS-200ultra Neo. He claims that with no other change, USB Cables, etc. kept the same, that he hears a "Dramatic Difference".
Since we're dealing with Digital Data (and the USB Cable as a possible source of Data Corruption is the same), I assume that the USB Input section on the otherwise quite nice Teac NT-503 DAC, is complete sh**. Maybe it isn't organically isolating the electrical signals coming in off the USB Input, maybe it isn't performing asynchronous reclocking of the input data. I suppose the Raspberry Pi's USB Output could be corrupting lots of its Output Packets ... But the problem is, the Teac doesn't expose any kind of USB Link Statistics, or internal statistics from the Teac's internal Asahi Kasei Microdevices dual-monaural AK4490EQ DACs. So we have no way of knowing what's going on.
But this lack of solid data isn't unique to the Teac: I don't know of a single Audio DAC that does offer data like this. Why not? If I had a DAC that told me things like the rate of USB CRC errors indicating Corrupt Packets, or data from the internal DAC Circuitry complaining about Digital Data not being supplied in time, etc., that would give me something to work with in terms of understanding problem areas. The cheapest 10¢ Ethernet NIC Chip has Link Statistics counters like this. Why is this? Is it the case that USB and DAC Chips don't tend to offer this kind of information? Or is it an issue of Audio companies not wanting to expose such information?
Casey
Since we're dealing with Digital Data (and the USB Cable as a possible source of Data Corruption is the same), I assume that the USB Input section on the otherwise quite nice Teac NT-503 DAC, is complete sh**. Maybe it isn't organically isolating the electrical signals coming in off the USB Input, maybe it isn't performing asynchronous reclocking of the input data. I suppose the Raspberry Pi's USB Output could be corrupting lots of its Output Packets ... But the problem is, the Teac doesn't expose any kind of USB Link Statistics, or internal statistics from the Teac's internal Asahi Kasei Microdevices dual-monaural AK4490EQ DACs. So we have no way of knowing what's going on.
But this lack of solid data isn't unique to the Teac: I don't know of a single Audio DAC that does offer data like this. Why not? If I had a DAC that told me things like the rate of USB CRC errors indicating Corrupt Packets, or data from the internal DAC Circuitry complaining about Digital Data not being supplied in time, etc., that would give me something to work with in terms of understanding problem areas. The cheapest 10¢ Ethernet NIC Chip has Link Statistics counters like this. Why is this? Is it the case that USB and DAC Chips don't tend to offer this kind of information? Or is it an issue of Audio companies not wanting to expose such information?
Casey
