Hopstretch

Hail Smeggy, Suquamish God of Creative Improvisation and Advanced Coital Techniques.

Massive Attack -- Blue Lines Still a goodie!

Bon Iver -- For Emma, Forever Ago

21! Woot woot!

I'll trade you some Mogamis for them.

Stretch also. DB, AB.

Woke up hungover. Went for run to atone. Contemplating fried breakfast.

Your new setup will be better than your old one. The 840C is probably better value than the DAC1. Good luck with the B22. Don't worry too much about cables for the 650s.

How many Parasound DACs can one man own?

Suede -- Head Music

Nihilists don't give a shit about your taxonomy.

Just auto-forward all mail through the Comcast account to Gmail and let them store it for you.

You. Back to Stax.

The Dream Academy -- The Dream Academy

I. Thank. You.

So the bottleneck in most USB DACs would be the receiver chip rather than the protocol? Speeding off topic, is it silly for me to make a fetish of USB or FireWire connectivity anyway when I could just run optical from my iMac and enjoy both hi-rez capability and a far larger choice of DACs, vintage and modern? I guess I just have it in my head -- for no substantive reason -- that toslink sucks and should be avoided where possible. Is there anything to that?

OK, the thing is that unless he's using material actually encoded for surround (movies, SACD etc.) there's not much point in going that way and paying for the three extra speakers. If he's using the usual office flat-panel monitor as a display you could either get a couple of decent, unobtrusive speakers to mount on either side of it or one of those sound bars that throws the illusion of surround sound. I can dig a couple of decent examples of both up for you if you like.

It's not clear to me what he's after. Can you elaborate a bit?

Sigur Ros -- Takk

Heh.

I guess we'll see. Someone on Head-Fi apparently has his hands on one already, but is currently preoccupied with trying to pick out just the right interconnects.

Pretty sure that's from the writer. Ayre have not made much of the 24/96 angle as Charles Hansen seems much more interested in handling jitter better through the use of asynchronous mode. The rationale behind the QB-9 is laid out here: http://www.ayre.com/pdf/Ayre_USB_DAC_White_Paper.pdf Regarding USB limitations, I see that the paper says: It appears to suggest that parallel use of the TAS1020B with custom drivers is required to get around that limitation, though I have no idea if this is the only way or indeed even if the limitation extends to other common USB chips.

I thought 16/44.1 was a limitation of the USB 1.1 spec, which most USB DAC chips still seem to be based around?