gbyleveldt
AVForums Grandmaster
Something that I've been messing around with for some time:
It uses the same Async USB interface as on the big Vivere, but I'm using a completely different DAC and architecture. In this guise it's running the TI PCM5142 DAC and a simple first order filter straight to the analogue outs - it cannot possibly get simpler than this!
The fancy stuff, of course, lies in the DAC chip. As you can see, this thing does 384k without missing a beat. And because I only have a USB input, I don't have to mess around with PLL's as I'm pulling the Dac clock direct off the USB interface's clocks (the PC also sync's to these very same clocks). So, what you get from this architecture is almost buggerall jitter in the signal chain - or at least orders less than you'd have from any other scheme.
Talking about fancy stuff, this DAC chip has its own DSP built in with some really fancy minimum phase filters already set up. The only catch is that this chip does not do DSD; at the moment for me it's a toss up between this DAC chip and the ES9018 - K2M. Personally, I prefer this over the ESS chip because of the horsepower and external simplicity - I can use USB power exclusively and get it to sound good. With the ESS chip I'll have to still include an I/V stage and this makes powering solely off USB difficult.
Anyway, this is still a work in progress as far as spec is concerned so it will likely change sometime down the road. I do hope this DAC chip stays though, it really does sound very good! I'm planning on rolling out a few prototypes of this
It uses the same Async USB interface as on the big Vivere, but I'm using a completely different DAC and architecture. In this guise it's running the TI PCM5142 DAC and a simple first order filter straight to the analogue outs - it cannot possibly get simpler than this!
The fancy stuff, of course, lies in the DAC chip. As you can see, this thing does 384k without missing a beat. And because I only have a USB input, I don't have to mess around with PLL's as I'm pulling the Dac clock direct off the USB interface's clocks (the PC also sync's to these very same clocks). So, what you get from this architecture is almost buggerall jitter in the signal chain - or at least orders less than you'd have from any other scheme.
Talking about fancy stuff, this DAC chip has its own DSP built in with some really fancy minimum phase filters already set up. The only catch is that this chip does not do DSD; at the moment for me it's a toss up between this DAC chip and the ES9018 - K2M. Personally, I prefer this over the ESS chip because of the horsepower and external simplicity - I can use USB power exclusively and get it to sound good. With the ESS chip I'll have to still include an I/V stage and this makes powering solely off USB difficult.
Anyway, this is still a work in progress as far as spec is concerned so it will likely change sometime down the road. I do hope this DAC chip stays though, it really does sound very good! I'm planning on rolling out a few prototypes of this
