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USB vs S/PDIF

poee

poee

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 15, 2005
Messages
257
I want to connect my PC to a stereo receiver that is strictly analog. I tried this initially with my mobo's onboard analog line-out, but it sounded horrible through my stereo system: too much noise and distortion, and thin.

From what I've been reading on these threads, the best sound comes from an outboard DAC, as sending the audio away from the noisy environment of a PC while in the digital domain will keep it clean and allow for the best analog audio after conversion. But I've also checked out the prices on some of the DACs that have been mentioned most, and I can't handle that kind of investment at this time. So I went searching for cheaper solutions.

I found this USB-based DAC that is certainly within my budget ($99):
http://www.nuforce.com/hp/products/iconudac/index.php

I also found this S/PDIF-to-RCA analog converter that's even less expensive:
http://www.gefen.com/kvm/dproduct.jsp?prod_id=5279

Would there be any discernible difference in sound quality (or functionality) between S/PDIF-to-stereo-RCA vs USB-to-stereo-RCA? I imagine the quality of the DAC would be the major factor. Sources connected to my preamp via RCA jacks (CD changer, tuner, DVD, Tivo) all sound great, except my PC via its onboard line-out.

How does audio work over USB anyway? I can see how the S/PDIF and TOSLink ports are always sending audio. Do you map the PC's audio to a specific USB port? Will the USB bus have to share this audio data with all the other data on other ports and will this cause any issues? Is there a bandwidth and/or "QoS" difference between USB 2.0 and S/PDIF? Is that audio data present at all the ports on a connected USB hub? Gah, I'm such a noob with consumer PC audio. I used to work on a Mac-based DAW about 10 years ago, and attaching balanced +4dBu TRS from a MOTU 1224 to my mixer is a different world than what I am dealing with now.



 
The USB DAC will show up as a seperate sound output device to the PC. You can then disable your onboard audio (either in the BIOS or from Device Manager in Windows), which will leave your USB DAC as the only remaining output. You can also leave both enabled and just choose which programs you want outputted to which in each programs configuration, setting which one you want as global default in Control Panel.

The audio data may or may not have to "share" USB bandwidth with other USB devices, depending on the design of the motherboard and whether each USB port is on it's own "bus" or on an internal "hub" Usually theres a few groups of USB ports on the board, each one a "hub". The actual amount of data that needs to be sent to make up an audio stream is actually pretty small in relation the bandwidth provided by USB 2.0. 2 Channel (stereo) CD quality audio works out to about 1.56Mbits a second, as compared to 480Mbits a second that USB is (theoretically) capable of. If you experience any kind of stuttering issues, just make sure it's not in the same group (hub) of USB ports as any high bandwidth devices (hard drives, TV Tuners, etc.) but I don't think it will be a problem really.

That said, it's quite possible to have a DAC internal to the PC that will not exhibit the noise and interference that you described above. I have a PCI Sondigo Inferno and it's analog output is squeaky clean, despite being inside a fairly noisy case with many fans and hard drives and whatnot. It's just a little more expensive to build quality analog circuits, and properly isolate power supply and such. Any quality sound card, internal or external, will be properly isolated and should give a clean signal.

Hope this helped

Dustin
 
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When doing the same research I found articles arguing USB over SPDIF and vice-versa. From what I gathered, you have to spend big bucks to get a quality S/PDIF solution, which needs something like a "crystal oscillator" (forgive my lack of knowledge). If I was wealthy, I would get this: http://www.stereophile.com/digitalprocessors/704mcda/.

For the rest of us, USB seems to be the way to go. You want asynchronous (not a typo), bit-matched, jitter-free playback. I did a lot of reading on head-fi and had it down to the Maverick Tube Magic vs Musiland Monitor 02 US. I went with the latter because it supports those things I mentioned while also fully supporting ASIO and WDM up to 24bit/192KHz. The Maverick has things like a "tube pre amp" that I was not interested in. I will say the Maverick is a much nicer looking unit. The drivers for the Musiland are very mature and work seamlessly with Windows XP or W7 (I have used it with both). It has a dedicated power suppy and sounds absolutely fantastic feeding my Nakamichi receiver / HD580's.

By the way, I have to say after praising this little device so many times on this forum that I am in no way affiliated with Musiland.
 
Thanks for all the great information! Now I'm not so leery of USB audio. That Musiland Monitor 02 sounds like a good idea, too. A Neko D100 is not in my budget... Does the Monitor 02 have volume control for its headphone amp?
 
I decided to buy the Musiland Monitor 02 US ($135 shipped). Will post back my impressions when it arrives. Thanks!
 
Yes it has volume control for the headphone amps through the Musiland control panel that replaces the windows volume control. There are actually 2 headphone amps on the unit, one for high impedance cans and one for low impedance. You will not be dissapointed, just make sure to get the latest drivers (1.0.8.4 I believe) and set it to "Precision Mode".
 
I got my Musiland Monitor 02 US hooked up and installed the latest driver (1.0.8.6 build 20100515). The fidelity and clarity difference between the Monitor 02 and my onboard sound is like night and day; it's as good as my standalone CD player's outputs. In contrast, the onboard sound was like gluing a foam pillow onto the front of my speakers! I have the analog outputs of the Monitor 02 going to my preamp (actually a mixing console) and out to a large stereo system that used to power a nightclub (L&R 3-way tri-amped 600W FOH and an 1100W 18" sub cabinet, Crown power amps, Rane X-over, Ashley 31-band, etc.)

I'm still trying to work with it, however, to get rid of the pops and clicks when I'm using my PC while listening to music. Especially when I am doing something in MediaMonkey, I get pops and crackling coming through my speakers at loud volume. I need to navigate through MM to make playlists, search for tracks, modify tags, etc., and the idea that I can't listen to music while doing this is simply unacceptable. I downloaded the ASIO plug-in linked to from the MM website, but it will not play back any tracks when enabled. (Any track in MM grays-out when trying to play back through the ASIO plug-in, then MM looks for the next playable track and soon all the tracks are grayed-out until I enable the default plug-in instead. So I do not know if the lower-latency ASIO plug-in will mitigate the popping and crackling or not.)

Is this meant to be used in a dedicated media server? I can see that working well, since you don't go mousing around in a media server much, and then would avoid the associated crackling. But if it is meant to be used with your main rig, while surfing the web or doing whatever, then I assume I am doing something wrong since this unit would not have such a good reputation if everyone experienced these pops and clicks. (I don't get any pops or clicks if I simply put down the mouse and listen to the music. Just pure, clear, glorious sound!)
 
I've heard about these pops and clicks, but haven't experienced them myself (unit is on my main PC). Do they occur during ASIO playback, or playback through WDM? Make sure you have ASIO set up correctly in MediaMonkey's preferences.

Also, make sure you use "Precision Mode" and not "Fast Mode" in the Musiland control panel. Also make sure any other sound devices are disabled in the system BIOS.
 
Thanks, SlipperyPete.

I cannot get ASIO to work at all. Not in MediaMonkey, anyway. It works in Foobar2000 (and WASAPI is supported there, too). MM4 is supposed to support WASAPI, whenever it comes out. But tracks pop and click in Foobar2000 also, seemingly correlated to CPU load (even the slightest load) that is added when I am doing things on the computer.

I did set it to Precision Mode as soon as I got it, as per your post #7 above.

Anyway, I'm still working on trying to get rid of the pops and clicks when I use my PC while listening to music. I changed the USB port that the Monitor 02 is plugged into, but this didn't help. I will try disabling the onboard sound in BIOS, though I had wanted to use that for my PC speakers. I guess I can just get an adapter to hook up the little 2.1 PC speakers to an aux out on my mixer for when I'm just playing Plants vs Zombies or something and I don't want to go through the big speakers. FWIW, the onboard sound is poor quality, but no pops and clicks when using the PC -- go figure.
 
That's funny because I tried using ASIO with Foobar and couldn't get it to work. Last night I tried listening to a track and MM wouldn't play through ASIO, the track was faded in the list like you said. I did recently upgrade to the 1.0.8.6 driver from 1.0.8.4, which may be the issue as I believe it is a beta driver. I will switch back later tonight.

Sometimes if you are using the unit through WDM the driver is still "locked in" even after programs are closed. This prevents ASIO from loading correctly as the unit is still in WDM mode. Use the task manager to make sure all threads using audio (web browsers, media players, etc) are closed.

With regards to the pops and clicks, I would recommend asking for help at the head-fi.org thread. Best of luck, once you get it working properly you'll love it.
 
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