Consider building an Easy DAC

[ErikdeBest]

Hi Andy

We are not talking about MP3 reproduction here. Brent recommends lossless compression (flac, ape) and the use of foobarr, a music player that bypasses all equalizer and volume controls of the PC.

look at www.diyaudiosystem.com

Erik

BTW - I also backup my music on an external HD - or two.

 

[andrew_whitham]

oh I see...

I still think that you need spdif for the time being, CD's are mighty popular.

BUT, as someone who spends a LOT of time with a laptop (and external HDD) as my only source of music then the lossless compression is very interesting - I'd never heard of that - so now I have to go learn

Andy

 

[kec]

so id have to say until they come out with large / HUGE compact flash cards then your idea is kinda useless.

SSD (Solid State Disks) will be on their way.... Samsung is releasing the first SSD laptop in Korea this month. It's only 32GB, but it's a start

http://www.laptoplogic.com/news/detail.php?id=921


-Ken

 

[lykkedk]

Hi again, I just ordred a 'simple' USB-DAC today, from dddac. Looking forward to recive it, and listen.

Maybe we could discuss a bit of FLAC / ASIO etc... here, or everything else that improve's or make the music stream from a PC / Laptop with USB or whatever.

I never really experimented with 'pc-music' before, so every comment's about it would be nice.

I am running Linux on my main machine, but have the possibility to test something with winXP too. I am thinking of driver's etc...

Anyone got any experiance with linux usb-dac / lossless ???

 

[johnthedoctor]

I'm about to assemble a usb dac kit. What happens if 2 of them are plugged into the PC?

I'm hoping they both work exactly the same, means I have the option of putting one in each speaker (plus amp) to make them active.

 

[Brent Welke]

multi dac

No problem to plug in multiple USB DACs. You can play them all at once but not from the same player. For example you can start Winamp multiple times and have each player play to a DAC and have them all playing at the same time.

But what I think you are after (me too, at least to try it) is to have one player use multiple DACs. To do this software is required to take multiple USB DACs and virtualize them as one multi channel DAC.

There is a physical requirement that all the DACs use a common Master clock signal and are all identical or it will not work well enough to be worth it. The end purpose is to use digital filters to do the crossover for speakers.

I have tried a bunch of digital filters and they didn't sound very good to me so I haven't been working very hard on this. I would still like to hear it.

My google researching led me to a company that I believe could write the driver/software to virtualize multiple USB DACs as one multi channel DAC. http://www.thesycon.de/deu/home.shtml

I have lots of USB DACs to try it when someone comes up with the software or driver. If it works well I would produce a board with 3 or 4 USB DACs on it with one master clock.

 

[johnthedoctor]

Thanks Brent, should have guessed it wouldn't be that easy.

Any way of splitting the the usb signal into 2 and having just 1 usb cable at the PC end? (The PC would have to think it's running just one dac.)

I'm still learning and having a usb dac + amp inside both speakers seemed a simple way of keeping all the analogue signal paths short.

 

[Brent Welke]

I am still learning too. I can not say I am an expert by any means of the word. I use my ears to guide me.

Sure one USB cable. The multi-DAC would have a built in USB hub. The computer would see it as 3 or more dacs.

USB is limited to 20 foot cables. It can be repeated with hubs or active cables, not sure how many times it can be repeated.

I don't find long interconnects (20 feet) to be a problem if they are terminated with a low impedance at the amp. The preamp or buffer driving the interconnects needs to be low impedance as well or it doesn't work.