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

so basically

the magical military grade stealth bomber radar detection chinese made $40 wal-wart ifi claimed was better than a linear psu is actually piece of shit?

 

I couldn't resist the tidal wave... Rednet 3 incoming.

 

You may find it will surpass your expectations,
or not!

JJ

 

Will you be using it with your Mutec?

One possible solution I considered is to use hqplayer to upsample everything to a single rate. But this is not optimal with my Yggdrasil.

 

Thanks for taking one for the team. The non-auto switching sampling rate would seem to be a pisser, curious to read your impressions of it compared to the Mutec MC-3+USB.

 

Yeah... Automatic sample rate switching is undesirable for a lot of pro audio. It'll be used with the Sonic Frontiers SFD-1 though, so keeping it at 44.1 is probably okay. The only other option is 48.

 

Besides the tidal wave, were you also unable to resist the tsunami, by any chance?

Would be interesting to hear comparisons between the Rednet and the microRendu.

 

Nope. Way too expensive for something from an unproven (in my book) company, and it only outputs USB audio. Maybe v2 would be of interest to me, not sure.

 

Is there a v2 coming?

I agree Rednet has good credentials. Sadly in my case I don't have a good solution for the sample rate, otherwise I'd think about getting one and putting it against my microrendu. For now I have resisted the tidal wave.

 

Regarding Rednet and sample rate, you could just upsample everything to 96 or 192kHz with any decent upsampler (JRiver, SSRC, iZotope etc) but I understand that this works against the magic in the Yggdrasil.

 

And likewise for Gungnir Multibit.

 

It seems like it could be pretty easily fixed but if it's aimed at pros then the question becomes will they...perhaps if a company or notable individual from the hi-fi world reaches out and explains the interest and appeal to them (and frankly, that there are individuals who are much quicker to shell out for these than home studio folks or even most smaller studios) they can consider offering an option.

 

Well Mutec created the USB product ostensibly for the audiophile market, so I guess it's not impossible.

Nonetheless just look at the CA thread and how the guy is struggling... Seems the firmware side of things will really need to change for general audiophile use.

 

I ended up replacing the stock wallwart of my Regen with the ifi iPower unit off the recommendations of folks on the CA forums. To my ears it sounded better, in mostly subtle ways. I wouldn't go so far as calling it a piece of shit, but I'm curious to know if there are better options. I know the Regen guys are about to unveil their own new power supply specifically made for the Regen.

 

Also, the folks over at CA seem to have ripped that review to shreds as the guy doesn't seem to have credibility and seems to have an agenda of some sort. Apparently the ipower has been measured by others with different results. I don't have a dog in this fight, I just find it strange that a PSU that sounds pretty good to my ears seemed to get slammed with "objectivist" measurements.

 

As Frank Zappa would have put it, "The crux of the biscuit", right there!

JJ

 

So... how about this family of doodads here:
https://www.minidsp.com/products/network-audio

 

AOIP is sorta a mix of several technologies that all need to 'mesh' together.

Right now it seems as though the Danté s/w is the go to platform due to its stability and maturity.
The hardware needs to be compatible with this specialized data format meant just for this purpose.
And it also must be compatible with the digital audio formats (spdif/AES3) AND have a killer clock etc.
Not to mention an ASIO (or equivalent) driver that is solid for use in a variety of players.

And if our current round of experiments duplicates those done earlier, it may be 'Better' to use GB glass fiber for a complete galvanic isolation setup, instead of using any form of CAT 5-6-7…

We'll know here before to long if these ethernet to single mode duplex optical transceivers contribute with 'Better' SQ using this method of transfer of digital audio.
Interesting Times in Audio Indeed!

JJ

 

I use that converter. It works. Mine is single mode, 100 Mbps I think. Advice from ca was that this is a better choice because the device is less complex than the gigabit one. Haven't compared the devices for the two speeds so can't say for sure...

But vs pure ethernet from router- yes it works.

 

Do you hear any changes in SQ?

JJ