Icarium

The only thing that matters is jitter + drivers and how painful they are/supported they are. And frankly while jitter is audible to me the driver thing is more important to me personally. That being said I've found used prices on the RME 9652 to be my sweet spot. That musiland thing though might be a great deal I should pick one out to shootout esp since my filthy hagusb is flaky these days.

It's just a usb to spdif converter.

I own and like my RME 9652 for the purposes of digital output. Why the 9652? I believe it's the cheapest card that will have latest driver support.

PMD100 knockoffs are certainly easy to generate since you just need to copy the code over to another chip. Of course China also is most likely where most of the old stock is located. PCM1704s I would guess are pretty difficult to knockoff.

Should be doable with the meter on the power supply in the second run.

Kk thanks guys

He's a newb he says. Thanks Grawk I will link him to this thread.

His budget is 350 bucks... I don't think he minds camping ebay/audiogon, but if its something that is immediately available then that would be more ideal. I know sony direct drive for cheap bucks is a pretty good deal so maybe a list of models/links for those would be perfect.

I like Eiji Yoshikawa, James Ellroy, Neal Stephenson.

The ZD is OTL. BA is transformer coupled. The Moth stuff I believe is all transformer coupled.

Should be bass heavy... there isnt a cut and dried line but low serial # trends towards being darker/more bass quantity and 10k = better highs/air/brighter

Just talked to Alex and he says 1 month from now +- 1 week. Larger production run than with the LCD-1s should be plenty to go around. There are going to be some cosmetic changes from the prototype.. hopefully for the better The last piece of the equation is yet again the cable... they are still exploring options as far as wire and if anyone has suggestions if they could shoot them an email or pm me about it and I can forward it to them. In fact they are somewhat interested in farming out the assembly if anyone is interested ;p Let me know and I can pass details.

Dunno I should talk to Alex tonight I'll check with him. Just got my first set of foam and put it in.. listening now Hrm I think I can hear 17khz now, but it's tough to say I need a longer test tone grr. Oh yeah this definitely helps.. I guess I am now a full believer in headphone modding grumble. Now to move on to dbel84 mods ;p

Hrm I don't know... my experience has been that unless the USB is aysnc -> directly to the dac or bulk mode that spdif from a card is less noisy/jittery.

Well of course I don't care how much jitter is in your chain... moreover I am not championing the wavelenth product by any means. In fact if you've read my posts carefully you'd know that my stance is that this product may not be better than your 70-75 dollar Chinese doohickey. Mostly I am highly skeptical that most manufacturers who quote jitter specs really measure how much jitter their product has and I bet many merely quote specs from parts they use. I'd expect Gordon Rankin to be legit in his measurements along with a few others, but... well a lot of people make claims like 0 jitter or jitter-free and it is those I'm skeptical of.

Thanks yeah I'm letting him know I'm doing it and what not for sure. He already offered up his credit report so I'll see if that's really mainly what my parents were looking for or whatever.

Anyone got a good recommendation on this front? My parents tasked me with doing this for my potential roomates. I'm not looking for something super indepth.. I figure just like criminal record if any and credit check that kind of thing.

I dunno I've never personally been all that willing to accept a manufacturer's jitter specs. I'm not sure there is a standard and universally used methodology to measure actual jitter performance. I bet most companies don't even really measure it they just quote the specs on some clock or part they use (This seems to be the typical modus operandi for manufacturers like the many who quote the SNR performance of the dac chips for their dacs performance when who knows if that's true or not)... I certainly wouldn't advise to you to totally discount jitter as something that matters to your ears prior to doing some tests yourself. I can definitely hear the difference. It is something i min-max to optimize? No. I'd say it certainly matters less than stuff like actual pieces of the chain (headphones/amp/source), design, output stages/devices, tubes, i/v, etc etc. But it's certainly more important and less subtle than say... cables of any sort. Well to my ears anyways.

Yeah I dunno haven't had much experience with it myself, and I'm hoping the Touch will be better, but I figured I'd chat with my boy j4cbo or perhaps that british mofo Grahame for the secrets of squeezebox optimization!

Well you are already kosher since you have it in your Ayre dac ;p I don't in any way dispute that async usb used in conjunction with a solid dac isn't one of the best possible ways to transport some digital. It is just too bad that Gordon's dacs aren't as sexy as the Ayre and more sanely priced. I am only questioning the sanity of someone paying more than 300 bucks for something like this. I mean you might as well buy a squeezebox touch when that comes out (Both will transport 24/96. If you only want redbook than a SB3 should be fine). The difference between the two is pretty much going to depend on which has a better clock and even if one has a vastly superior one then the differences may be exceedingly subtle as reclocking from usb is already probably going to be the main benefit from either solution. More experimentation with the chinese doohickey should be done... January when my self imposed ban on buying audio crap and I'm in I wouldn't expect it to be as good as an in-dac async usb dealio, but if it stacks up well against my RME card and an M-Audio Transit (Which I can borrow for the purposes from my brother) then it is a winner for shizzle.

Musiland Monitor 01 USD 24/192 USB to SPDIF - Head-Fi: Covering Headphones, Earphones and Portable Audio This thing... and I think screaming oranges has one and talks about it somewhere on these forums, but I'm too lazy to dig it up. If the drivers don't suck, which they surely do. Plus if it really is async usb, which as bad as ghetto chinese coders are... it really isn't that impossible to pull off (Supposedly easier than the standard synchronous usb but just not in demand by the rest of humanity lulz) it could be.... So even if like it is async.. the Gordon Rankin thing may be better because it probably doesn't require install of drivers.. but that's more a convenience thing then anything else, but 70 dollars is worth a gamble. It may be a better deal than an M-Audio Transit which is my go to USB -> SPDIF converter option at about the same price.

Eh.. I wouldn't throw that much props to Gordon Rankin. Having owned and heard other dacs of his.. I haven't been overly impressed especially for the MSRP. A lot of people are obsessed with jitter. The Empirical Audio guy for one.... sure I think Gordon is a lot more legit, but I wouldn't kneel to him as jitter-god ;p I'm sure this product is pretty good for what it does, but at 900 dollars? My understanding is that writing some firmware to do Async USB doesn't require a genius, but the overlap between competent coder + familiarity with the painful USB spec + interest/design in audio is a rare thing. Fortunately j4cbo is going to do his own solution based on a less outdated chip.. of course he isn't doing something silly like making a spdif reclocker so it'll inside his own dac.

It is! But not as evil as BNC feh BNC!

I like my RME hdsp (not digi) 9652. I shot it out with my spectral dac and its dedicated transport (slaved to the dac etc so supposedly as good or better than async usb) and there was a slight difference... it was not subtle enough that 4 different parties without prior communication could pick it out (Minutely less bass quantity/definition, some micro details especially in the high... traditional areas where less jitter help), but subtle enough that none of us thought it was worst the 2-3k price difference between transports and two of us (The owner and I) are very much cost no object guys. The owner has since sold his dedicated transport (For a profit) and bought the same card. It's MSRP'd at 700 bucks or so, but you can find them used on ebay for between 200-400 dollars. I paid about 323 shipped. Why this one and not other RME cards? Well it's the latest of that line and thus has drivers up through Windows Vista at least.. hopefully they aren't dickfaces and release a new card for Windows 7 and stop supporting the 9652 because then I will be sad. If you are a mac user they have drivers, but more then that I can't tell you since I don't roll Mac. Is this card better than other card options? No idea. It's too much of a pain to shoot out so I haven't bothered. RME has quite a rep and I'm a sucker for "0 latency asio" which they claim and I have found to be mostly true and supposedly they have good drivers. If it was 500 bucks I'd probably have done more investigation but 300 didn't make me feel super inclined to ask questions ;p