Will a quality USB cable make a difference....

"I'm pretty certain he was the first though!"

I believe Ploytec and other Pro Audio designers had async designs out first, resulting in products from EMU and Tascam. I interfaced these to my Pace-Car.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Steve,

Streaming data is streaming data, whether it's audio files or instrumentation data. It's either bit perfect and time correct or it's not. Yes, jitter is problematic but, as I'm sure that you would agree, not nearly as much with USB2 as it was with USB1. I'm sure that my next comment will further endear me to the peanut gallery, but frankly, I will say that I believe that most audiophiles can't discerne jitter (w/ USB2), and wouldn't know what it sounded like even if if they could. What's the worst jitter you have measured for USB2 gear that was in spec? Probably not more than 125uS or so, and I don't know anyone who can detect that. I believe that most of the sound effects that are erroneously identified as jitter are in fact the result of elasticity buffer stack overflows.

Re: my comment for Gordon Rankin - I was not making a wholesale endorsement of Gordon or his products. I have never met the man, but I'm sure that he (like you) is a smart guy. I was simply recommending his whitepapers to another poster as a good primer on USB, since there seems to so much misinformation bandied about on this forum.

Ed,

Dude, did I run over your cat or something? I apologize if I inadvertently besmirched one of your audio idols. But I would appreciate it if you would stop lecturing. As I have said previously, you don't know me or anything about me. Your assumptions and guesswork are both incorrect. If you want to know something about me, just ask. I am an open book.

Some people will remember some of my posts and it's no surprise I agree with Br3098. Any thing that a USB cable can do to "impede" bit flow is probably negligible compared hard timing realities in a PC or adapting the clock in the DAC for non asynch implementations. Interesting point about the connectors.

Also, I'm tired of people saying "trust your ears" or something to that ilk. Yes, if you like what you hear that all that matters. However, when you have to compare two things, you have to rely on your brain. And it's been proven that you can't trust your brain to accurately recall small differences in audio frequencies especially after a few seconds of time elapses.

larry

I especially enjoy those who dismiss the possibility it is the cable yet make unsubstantiated guesses like "I believe that most of the sound effects that are erroneously identified as jitter are in fact the result of elasticity buffer stack overflows" or "I believe that most audiophiles can't discerne jitter (w/ USB2), and wouldn't know what it sounded like even if if they could."

BTW what difference does it make whether or not they can identify the source of the distortion as long as they can hear it. I bet you could inject an audible level of measurable distortion like THD into a system and most couldn't tell you what it is and furthermore wouldn't care as long as they had a way to reduce it.

So to sum it all up, yet another gigantic waste of time. I could search the archives and come up with hundreds of threads exactly like this one. The engineers can't explain it so they refuse to believe it exists while others don't care a hoot about explanations as long as they are convinced they hear it.

Oh yeah, and once again it has deteriorated into a pissing contest between the two factions. Who could have seen that one coming :>)

.

.