Article: Berkeley Audio Design Alpha USB Review

[Greywind]

Hey Chris,<br />

<br />

Excellent write up, thanks for the hard work. This stuff is so helpful to us tinkerers.<br />

<br />

I was curious why the Berkeley guys in the Alpha Converter manual suggest that kernal streaming mode is still experimental. I find it to sound better than Wasapi in my experiments, which are of course not exactly scientific, done on a Zalman Win7 machine. I tried playing KS mode through the Alpha usb into my Alpha dac and couldn't get it to work. No sound.<br />

<br />

I went back to the standard Wasapi driver and thought the sound was great, very high resolution, but perhaps too much for my ears (on my system). I also preferred the spdif sound to the preferred aes, again because it sounded more natural to my ears, less digital.<br />

<br />

Has anyone else had any success with kernal streaming using the Alpha usb--> Alpha Dac setup? Is it possible? Any chance the Berkeley guys might consider a KS driver for Win7?<br />

<br />

I also played with the Sotm usb interface but got too many FIFO errors (using XXHighEnd) in the control panel. The onboard usb2 bus worked better. Not sure why.<br />

<br />

Am now comparing a Phasure NOS1 (usb) dac and hope to come up with some findings to report. <br />

<br />

/Lee