New high speed USB isolator from TI - ISOUSB211

I cannot listen an eye diagram 🙂
But samadi81 tried re-driver board?
"The re-driver has improved sound quality depending on the setting of the signal conditioning. The setting value varies depending on the nature of the cable, but it had a good effect with medium-intensity signal conditioning for cables over 1 meter."
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BTW
You said that You measured the loss of USB datas that is not related with listening
 
I have tested asynchronous UAC2 with I2S (i.e. digital) loopback at 768kHz/32bit without any errors (bit perfect to 32 bit) in the measurement period of 15 minutes. This was without USB isolator and using USB power. Even if there were a random error now and then I doubt a USB redriver would be of help. USB isolator may be useful if there are severe noise or grounding issues with the USB connection.
Same here, never had any problems with USB data integrity even in extremely long measurement sessions, loopback recording at high fs, for hours.

Using Win10 and ASIO for RME ADI-2 Pro, you can monitor CRC and other errors on the USB driver level and I did actually try to provoke errors. I had to cut open an USB cable, single out of one of the data lines and place a large ferrite close to that conductor, to totally screw up line impedance (CM and DM). At some point of proximity communication would break totally and re-enumeration would also fail. So a binary go / no-go scenario, basically. Backing off again a little bit, once it worked the connection was reliable as tested for about 6 hours.

The only way I could provoke errors with a normal certified USB cable was equally brutal, with an ESD pulse (from a piezo lighter) creating a ton of peak current in a wire parallel to the USB cable. I used a fully isolated section between two USB isolators to reduce the risk of frying the RME's USB input...
 
You said that You measured the loss of USB datas that is not related with listening
This is exactly related!
For good sound performance, there are only 2 things required from the digital interface:
1) no errors in data ("bit perfect")
2) no errors in timing (jitter) at the point of D/A conversion (this is provided by async. sync. from the goog oscillator, located close to the DAC chip).

Eye diagram is a good thing, but on a picture above I didn't saw a problem. It changed, but still inside the requirements.

BTW, I tried to switch 2 USB Hosts (PC and Media Plyer) to one USB DAC port with a regular signal relay (Omron G6K).
Using this type of relays for USB High Speed switching is totally against the rules, but it works.
I did not measure the eye diagram, but with 1-1.5m cables there were no problem with "listening".
(USB PHY was Microchip's USB3318).
 
I have seenADUM3165 is much sensitive to the output USB cable - tried few USB-A/Type-C cables with Cosmos ADC.
Some cables shows very high packet lost level, which make this setup unusable.
The same cables with the TI's ISOUSB211 based isolator works perfect (~ the same PCB schematic and layout for both versions, just different chip, and ISOUSB211 - with external 1.8v regulators ant both ends).
 
....
For good sound performance, there are only 2 things required from the digital interface:
1) no errors in data ("bit perfect")
2) no errors in timing (jitter) at the point of D/A conversion (this is provided by async. sync. from the goog oscillator, located close to the DAC chip).
....
The only thing left is the ground conducted interference that perhaps could act negatively on a not well thought out analog parts of a downlink unit. But I agree of the above list and it is complete wrt. digital L3 transfers. But sh*t happens either on ground or radiated disturbances and may impact - thats the only reason aI can think of if there still is a difference.... I always they to use opto if possible. Opto dont sound dull - it's the sound of "correct" - change other things of one is not happy 😉

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And the good thing is that as long as you stay in the digital domain, clocks dont matter as the Fs is implied. It is only at D/A conversion that the clock matter.

Insight: stay digital as long as absolutely possible 🙂

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