Audiophile USB to PCM

The Big Ben is design to act as a master digital clock in a recording studio environment. If you're running three or more pieces of digital equipment all sort of gremlins start to appear if you try to clock the devices in a chain-like manner. The Big Ben provides a very high quality master clock that all the various digital equipment can sync to. While it may work as a jitter reduction device, it probably is overkill for all but the most high end of audiophile systems. Particularly if you D/A reclocks or upsamples, the Big Ben is really not needed.

Winchell, I'm interested to hear what you think about the Audiophile. I'm still using it for the simple reason that I don't feel like shelling out more money for a product that isn't all the way there. We are very much in the early growing pains in terms of products dealing with hdd playback. A year from now, I am convinced, will present us with vastly better/more options. The M-Audio is fine, but it's definitely the weak link. The other reason why I'm still living with it is because my next product is definitely going to give me the capability of browsing with remote from the couch. It is a PAIN to not be able to skip around, pause or anything else. I know a few of these products exist already, but they either work 50% of the time, or they look like a bad alarm clock and none of them have the browsing capability I want.

I retrospect, I'm glad I only got the Audiophile, because I would not want to drop $1000+ and not be able to sit and enjoy the music without getting up constantly.

There are lots of ways to solve that problem -- the technology already exists.

There's nothing stopping you from having a laptop right in front of you, with which you can control volume, select songs, etc.

If your hard drive is part of a home theater, you can use something like a Mac Mini, plug it ito your video display and use a remote mouse to control the volume and select songs from your video display.

And there are still others.

Kfreichen - to answer your question, I now offer two products, the Off-Ramp Turbo and the Freeway that are modified Transit boards with external power supplies. I also offer a battery power supply for them. They both convert USB to digital coax, but the Off-Ramp has a Superclock3 as master clock. These are very low jitter sources that can pass 24/96 data upsampled by Foobar.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Manufacturer/modder