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USB to I2S 384Khz - DSD Converter

opc

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Hi I asked him some of the above questions.

For over 192Khz for now use kernel streaming, wait for ASIO to come, hopefully soon, they are working on it. WASAPI in J.River will only do 192Khz.

I also tried and failed to get bit-perfect operation under WASAPI and Win 7 the other day. Using the Audio Precision Bittest, direct I2S out to the AP, and connected to a Windows 7 PC using J River there doesn't seem to be any way to get bit-perfect reproduction.

Every other USB card I have tried with ASIO drivers (Musiland, XMOS, exaU2I) worked perfectly in this setup with an error rate of 0 even after several hours of running.

I'm starting to think most of the issues I'm seeing are related to the WASAPI implementation and not the Amanero card itself, which means I'm really crossing my fingers for good ASIO support under Windows 7. This WASAPI thing seems like a bit of a crock to me.

Cheers,
Owen
 
I also tried and failed to get bit-perfect operation under WASAPI and Win 7 the other day. Using the Audio Precision Bittest, direct I2S out to the AP, and connected to a Windows 7 PC using J River there doesn't seem to be any way to get bit-perfect reproduction.

Every other USB card I have tried with ASIO drivers (Musiland, XMOS, exaU2I) worked perfectly in this setup with an error rate of 0 even after several hours of running.

I'm starting to think most of the issues I'm seeing are related to the WASAPI implementation and not the Amanero card itself, which means I'm really crossing my fingers for good ASIO support under Windows 7. This WASAPI thing seems like a bit of a crock to me.

Cheers,
Owen

Owen, Do you have a Linux(and/or Mac) setup you could test it with? I could provide the hardware if you are interested..

John
 
Can someone present a fairly simple explanation of how Linux and OSX avoid these difficulties? That's my understanding and please correct me if I'm not getting that correct.

Linux and OSX have USB 2.0 audio drivers built into the base OS(as long as the DAC or Transport manufacturer(Amanero in this case) adhere's to the driver standard).. No "special Sauce" needed. There are other tweaks (pulse audio vs ALSA, kernel tweaks(even Real Time Kernel replacements, which some people swear by) that "can" improve (according to some) the SQ even more, but it basically works out of the box.
 
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O.K. This Asus M4A88T-1 Dlx is a home brew that was intended for JRiver but will now hold Linux. Is there a recommended Linux build for audio?
 

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O.K. This Asus M4A88T-1 Dlx is a home brew that was intended for JRiver but will now hold Linux. Is there a recommended Linux build for audio?

I'm Jealous.. ;) nice package. Too bad you need a cpu fan (I've had something in the works using a fanless Atom board..)

MPD (music player daemon ) with the latest ALSA is the easiest way to the best sound (baring the tweaks I mentioed). The MPD-Pup Distro is the quickest/easiest way to get things up and running, using PuppyLinux prepackaged with MPD. Less easy, but a good way to go if you want to learn a bit more is VoyageMPD, which is a stripped down version of Debian designed to run on small embedded X86 boxes.. I was running it with my Squeezebox with the OS running off flash, with the DB and music on a HD..

There is lots of great info on the PC-source forum here, and if you are interested, lots of reading material about setting up VoyageMPD on a lower powered system on this Audio Circle Diskless thread
 
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I also tried and failed to get bit-perfect operation under WASAPI and Win 7 the other day. Using the Audio Precision Bittest, direct I2S out to the AP, and connected to a Windows 7 PC using J River there doesn't seem to be any way to get bit-perfect reproduction.

Every other USB card I have tried with ASIO drivers (Musiland, XMOS, exaU2I) worked perfectly in this setup with an error rate of 0 even after several hours of running.

I'm starting to think most of the issues I'm seeing are related to the WASAPI implementation and not the Amanero card itself, which means I'm really crossing my fingers for good ASIO support under Windows 7. This WASAPI thing seems like a bit of a crock to me.

Cheers,
Owen

I would try installing the latest Thesycon based USB audio class 2 drivers for Windows. It would involve editing some INF files though.
 
Thanks MrSlim. I do have a dual fan 40 MM liquid system in the works but the power supply is the bigger noise problem - worling on it.

I'll follow your recommendations and report the results.

Thanks

If you are just planning on using this for music, you can think much lower power, with the only spinning part being the media storage disk drive. The Intel Atom board I am using has a 12V AC adapter input, using a laptop power brick (could also use a nice linear supply.. hmmmm) no fans at all

Sorry for leading this off topic.. BCMBob, we can discuss this elsewhere..
 
I've been comparing JRiver's WASAPi with Foobar's (V 3.0- both Push & Event) and there are important two differences. JRiver cannot output 32bit nor 352.8/384KHz through WASPI to the Amanero drivers whereas Foobar can do perfectly.

When Peter was designing the new WASAPI plugin I suggested he used an alternative way to querying the drivers for "accepted" bit depths because I knew my soundcard Xonar ST did indeed accept 32bit WASAPI if fed to it. I don't know exactly what or how he did it but with all WASAPI implementations from different players I've tested it is impossible to go beyond 24bit with the Xonar drivers except with the newest Foobar plugin. Ditto for the Amanero. I suspect the Amanero WDM drivers need a little extra work. Hopefuly ASIO drivers will come soon and have this little bugs fixed.