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That's very interesting. I'm a believer in the differences between USB cables, but I tried this at home. Now, I may not have done it right, but you only have to be off by one sample for the tracks not to cancel each other.

So he seemed to address the issue of timing the tracks. I agree, any timing issue and the test is not valid.

To be honest, I am surprised he got such a measurable difference. -25db down would definitely be audible.

I was amazed while at Charlie's with the difference in USB cables. Jim recently lent me one of the cables we auditioned and I put it in my system and it again reinforced the difference that USB cables make. I can't think of a reason why that should happen but I do hear the difference. "Every day beautiful theory is shattered by ugly old reality"

That was a fascinating video. It was surprising how much difference there was. Of course the leading/trailing edge of the square wave or pulse waveform is going to be impacted by the cable capacitance/inductance (rounding or ringing), as well as transmission line reflections. You are depending on triggers to detect a threshold voltage that constitutes a "1" or "0". I suppose this is more of a "jitter" issue, affecting the timing of when the change in state is detected. I was not expecting as much of audible difference though, that was very surprising. However I can say in my listening that USB cables have a significant audible influence on sound.

David

If you want to build your own cheap endpoint, the Dell/Wyse 5070 thin client looks like a great start. Newegg has a bunch of different refurbished models available for <$200 with RAM & storage (OS only, not enough for music)....

Roscoe

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I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.

waiting for a comment from Dave R on the USB cable test

Interesting video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvu_doQfAI0

It certainly is. Good luck finding a Pi2AES, though.

I gather from the video that my Holo May DAC's USB implementation is so good that it is a non-issue. But still interesting that he can see such a difference in the DACs analogue output due to noise and jitter on input.

Yes, that was interesting too, about the Holo.