Comments on Profile Post by landroni

It's funny how they used to have an optical only Modi and now they have a coax only device

I actually asked him to put it on Eitr, in the middle of the development cycle. After enduring his vitriolic rebuke of all things consumer-grade-digital-optical, I decided not to fight that fight. Plus, we won't get customer service requests wondering why optical doesn't work well (or at all) at 24/192. Plus, for advanced neuroses, getting AES from coax is a transformer dongle away.

Does spdif converted to AES have the same performance as a transport that offers native AES?

AES is SPDIF. Through a transformer. Via XLR. That is all. There is no magic to AES. If the Eitr had AES output, it would have a different connector. It also wouldn't fit in our standard small chassis. We figured that doubling the price to put it in a bigger chassis to have a different connector that does exactly the same thing was pretty stupid. So we didn't do that.

So here go my shattered dreams of using a Lifatec cable...

Do you care more about glass cables or do you care more about sound quality? ;)

I do think it's weird that optical can barely do 192k when fiber networks are in the GHz range. There's inherent advantages to optical that shouldn't be discounted, but the mechanism used for audio is an inferior implementation for whatever reason.

I think it was a cheap imitation of what was still an expensive technology. Just look at the connectors, for starters: like shining a torch in a hole?

But still, was getting good results from it a dozen years ago. Ordinary sample rates, though.