USB Nervosa Thread Decrapifiers, pro interfaces, and bears oh my

No the SATA power is for additional power. The power from PCIe would be regulated to power the controllers and ports.

 

I have always only had access to digital output through USB because I only ever owned laptops. I own an Eitr and it was a revelation for me, it made an enormous difference in sound quality.

I am in the process of building a computer, and I can pick out a mobo with optical or coax (leaning towards coax), and of course source nervosa has kicked in full gear. I assume that SPDIF off the motherboard will be a dramatic improvement over non-Eitr USB, but I'm wondering how mobos perform as sources (e.g. vs Eitr) and if it'd be worth it to get a dedicated card with its own clock? Current DAC is Modi Multibit, Gungnir Multibit as end game. Is the difference going to be negligible enough to not bother and I'm worried about nothing? Does SPDIF source quality have notable variations outside of extreme cases?

 

Read the first post in the thread again, and stick with your Eitr To improve on it, you would have to spend much more money for something better, such as a Lynx card.

I've owned RME 9632 and M-Audio 192 and Gen 5 USB is superior to both. Mobo S/PDIF will be worse than a dedicated card.

Yep, you're worried about nothing. Just use Eitr with a decent cable (eg Pyst).

I'm currently comparing a couple of non-audiophile usb cards as a source for Gen 5 USB but difference is very small or non-existant.

 

I don't have a ton of experience with non-USB sources, and I believe you (to the extent that someone should believe a single opinion on the internet), but it seems really odd to me taking something subpar and correcting it performs better than something that was already much better to begin with. Like how EQing subpar headphones to flat might be a step in the right direction but it'll still never match the performance of a better set of headphones, y'know?

 

Optical SPDIF is the worst digital connection in my opinion. Coax is more robust. AES is very solid. Motherboard stuff I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole. You can buy PCI cards and stuff but you have an Eitr. Stick with it. Test the mobo optical for yourself when you're done.

 

You don't have to just believe me It is the prevailing opinion on this forum.

But yes, it does seem counter intuitive that fixing USB gives a better result than many SPDIF sources. It all depends on the implementation.

USB and SPDIF have different shortcomings. A big problem with asynchronous USB is electrical noise on the power and data lines. The accuracy of the source clock is not important to audio quality with asynchronous USB.

With SPDIF, on the other hand, the source clock accuracy is important for audio quality. Unlike USB, Pro audio cards with SPDIF are usually electrically isolated. Mobo SPDIF and consumer cards are usually not isolated. And the clocks on mobo SPDIF will likely be poor.

The clock in the Eitr (and other similar devices) will be superior to that found in many cheap SPDIF sources. As you are probably aware, DDCs (such as the Eitr) extract the audio data from the USB packets whilst isolating the electrical noise and then generate a clean SPDIF signal with a highly accurate clock. Eitr does this very well at relatively low cost compared to other solutions.

Gungnir Multibit and Yggdrasil already have clock regeneration on their SPDIF inputs. I do not know why Gen 5 USB sounds better than SPDIF from a cheap pro sound card (such as M-Audio 192) into Gungnir Multibit, but it does.

Edit: You could try searching for posts by torq in this thread and maybe the Eitr thread. He is very knowledgeable about this stuff.

 

S/PDIF TOSLINK has 4ns of jitter designed into the spec, there's nothing about that which is an "opinion".

Ok, facetoiusness off, jitter is what we try so hard to avoid and upgrade out of our digital links, so choosing the one interface that has an amount of it baked in is not terribly sensible.

 

A lot of my listening is done through streaming Tidal over a PC. Does the quality of the router and router power supply impact sound quality or does Eitr take care of any noise introduced by an inexpensive router and power supply? Would it be worth spending $50 for an iFi iPower for the router? I am not aware of any audiophile grade routers on the market. Thanks.

 

Assuming not troll question: unless something is terribly, horribly wrong with your motherboard, no noise coming in via ethernet should make it through your motherboard to usb, certainly not enough that Eitr would care.

It's all very low power, unless you're using industrial gear that uses Power-over-Ethernet, and if you were you'd know by the (tens of) thousands of dollars spent on your network gear.

Just don't sit your Eitr on your router. Especially if it has WiFi.

 

Thanks @Taverius not trolling at all, appreciate the help.

 

Please don’t give audioquest any more ideas!

 

Hey, if AQ wants to take on Cisco, more power to them.

 

Just as a FYI Ethernet, as a standard, requires isolation transformers after the jacks. Some expensive jacks have the transformers built in. The ethernet transformer's where the small transformers on the Eitr come from anyway...

 

It's that why the sockets always seem to extend much deeper back than would be required by the jack?

Didn't know that, that's awesome, thanks!

 

Some input from the entry-level-zone:

I had a suboptimal combination of a cheap mobile phone with less than stellar USB and an old USB DAC (Musicstreamer+) that was never made for OTG use in the first place. Instead of throwing a decrapifier at it, I followed the general advice here and upgraded to a better DAC instead - the Modi Multibit. Now this was very good advice, as no decrapifier-at least at reasonable cost - could have made this difference. And I am really happy with the Modi Multibit as such.

However I hear digital artifacts that I would not prefer to hear. And I also hear them from my 1.000€ Lenovo Thinkpad via USB. I do not want to cause USB nervosa with anybody, but I think a Modi Multibit could use a better source, so I compared this to my cheap CD-player (Teac, around 220.- €) via SPDIF.

The Modi Multibit is said not to be at its best with USB, so it was quite a surprise, that SPDIF in the beginning did not sound better, but rather worse. Definitely greyish, altogether more behaved, but lacking in liveliness. And clouded.

The next day I thought about this and realized that the artifacts from the CD player were not exactly the same as from a MODI that had not been properly warmed up, but from somewhat the same kind. So I did a second test after warm-up of the CD-player for 2-3 hours and now with a real digital coax cable (nothing fancy, 10€). That was pretty much at the same level - very small differences.

The day after I wanted to cross-check, but now the batteries of the laptop were empty. So I had to connect the laptop to power (and it had to charge batteries rather heavily) and now SPDIF was definitely better and I got an impression on how noise on USB sounds like.

I cross-checked this again a day later and SPDIF from CD was better on the Modi Multibit when the source has warmed up a little, however there are still artefacts. So my conclusions are the following:

USB from an entry-level-perspective may be better than one might think. When it comes to a Modi Multibit, it is hard to say what problems are in the USB source itself, and what problems are within the USB input (without having other gear to examine).

A cheap CD player was better on the Modi Multibit (after warm-up), but from triangulation I would say, that it was not the SPDIF-end-of-all-evils, but in the end still a cheap CD player. And there are generally less absolutes than I thought there might be.

So I will go on the way to explore better sources for the Modi Multibit. The good news is that there are now several promising options below 200$, be it an Eitr or a Pi with DigiHAT. And I think this is not about nervosa.

 

What kind of digital artifacts? Have you heard the same recordings without these artifacts? On which setup?
I highly doubt cold Modi Multibit and SPDIF output of cold CD player having same problems.

 

allegro said: ↑
I am not aware of any audiophile grade routers on the market

Holy shit. An "audiophile grade switch"
https://sotm-usa.com/products/sms-200ultra-ethernet-switch-mod?variant=433039147020

They start with a NETGEAR GS105NA (~$33) switch and modify right up to $1700!

 

LMAO
Imagine how much a GPON router, to connect directly to an optical fiber wall socket, but with it's own linear power supply, regulators, etc, all in one box, CNC milled from aluminum and the looks of a real Hifi component would cost.
On the possitive side of things, it should eliminate the audio nervosa of 48423 different PSUs and isolators, but if that "switch" costs 1750$...I don't want to know how much they could charge for something like the hypothetical one box router & GPON ONT with a linear power supply that I described...

 

That same f'ing brand sells you aftermarket clocks for your PCs.

 

Despite all the talk of toslink being bad I sold my Eitr last week and have been using the optical input on my Onyx with the intent of making my setup that much simpler. I may very well be deaf because I think it sounds about as good as the Eitr did.

I would use the USB in on the Onyx if I didn't notice issues with pops and clicks. Not usable to me. I've messed with the settings for quite a while. Tried a few different drivers. Even setting things to 'safest' did not fully fix the pops and clicks. At the very least the Eitr is a much better USB solution for my PC than the built in USB on the Onyx.

If nervosa gets the best of me I'll pick up another Eitr in the future, but I hope to be content as is.