I am very curious if those who have fancy Ethernet cables compared the sound of streaming with these high end cables to the USB input of their streamer (or course disconnect the internet fully). Shouldn’t that be the best sound? cause there’s no noise that can come in from either router, switch or Ethernet / WiFi?
I am just curious, not skeptical of high end ethernet cables.
What about low plain resonances and counter cyclical frequency modulation just to mention 2 major issues with USB.
.sjb
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How do you get Qobuz (for example) to a streamer with just a USB cable.
I meant you only play files from a USB stick. No streaming from online sources.
You should use the input that the manufacturer optimizes and recommends. For example, I use a Holo Audio streamer and their USB and I2S implementations are optimized and support high rate DSD, I wouldn’t use any other input although I2S sounds better to these ears.
I use a Primare streaming bridge. They advice not using the USB port if sound quality is the aim.
IMO the USB input of the ndac is not as good as streaming through a streaming bridge without expensive switches or cables.
USB is not all the same though. Both USB and ethernet are packet based transmission systems. But USB has more variance.
- USB flash memory
- USB SDD
- USB HDD
- USB ASIO (as a digital audio carrier)
- USB Bulk Pet (as a digital audio carrier)
The options complicate the issue significantly. For the digital audio carriers, my tests found that difference between standard ASIO and Bulk Pet was simply enormous. However, very few DACs support Bulk Pet (I think it is mostly Luxman at this time) and even fewer transports. Despite the massive improvement I heard, I moved away from Bulk Pet simply because I didn’t like the usability of the transport and couldn’t find another with Bulk Pet output.
A large benefit of USB flash storage over the others is that the clock is driven by the DAC and there is no externally connected ground plane. In other words, the DAC/streamer remains isolated. That might be true of SDD and HDD also depending on their power requirements, though those implementations will supply their own clock.
FWIW Bulk Pet overrides the standard USB drivers to form oversized packets that are several times larger than ASIO packets. The effect on the DAC’s USB input is that it is doing about quarter of the processing of ASIO and this results in less processing related noise.