Remove Display Driver Improves Audio Quality Greatly!

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Back on topic, removing or disabling the video is often bundled in HDMI and there's one less audio route less with that as well. Recommend to disable this if possible.

 

Intrigued by Jriver's comment, I headed over to the JPLAY forum and picked up some valuable information on a solution that's on my mind for a while and now solved.

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what's the "valuable information on a solution" would you mind share?

 

It is concerning extending AES3 other than running a new two core and shield cable. I hope to kill two birds with one stone with the Adnaco system to remotely mount an RME AES3 card and USB2.0 port closer to the DAC. I'm not getting the results with USB I'd hoped for after all this time sticking with USB, so I thought to give the RME solution a try. Only needed for 192fs and under PCM, so that's fine for what I want to do.

It still means running a cable from PC to DAC some 25m, but it's a smaller, but more difficult to install fibre optic cable Still need to study prices of the hardware, on the face of it, the simple two core cable would win so far... oh well.

 

The JPLAY forum had a post on this topic, I don't normally venture there, but since there is such animosity with Jriver, curiosity got the better of me.

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Don't really know what you are saying but it sure sounds exotic to me.

Are these the stuff you are referring to:

RME: HDSPe AES

Adnaco-S5: 20 Gb/s PCIe Gen 2 Over Fiber Optic Expansion System

 

Very interesting indeed, please give more information or the results you are getting when you have! I think the PCM digital connection really needs an update... all these high tech extensions, re-clockers, numerous extra hardware... just for this ancient PCM digital stream to work right...

 

Yes, they're the equipment I'm referring to.

 

As an experiment I fed the coax signal out of SACD player into DAC, playing a standard CD. In setting up a simple A/B, the DAC played the same music from computer/player/hard drive via USB. Comparisons were made between the two inputs (COAX and USB) to the DAC reasonably easily as well as the analog out from the SACD player.

 

There was a pretty tough call to compare the coax input of the DAC to the SACD player, to me they sounded the same, therefore the differences are just construction and topological differences between the SACD and the DAC.

When the same music was compared via USB, the results of the music were very obvious changes, a drop in height of sound stage, and smearing of the finer details, I suppose a classic veiling. Now this could be a deficiency in a number of places, all the way from the computer, so I tried a HP workstation and a Mac Mini, audirvana + to Jriver, but the effect was much the same. The SACD also has a USB input, and the performance was much the same as for the DAC input, lifeless.

 

My thinking now is to bypass USB altogether with the RME, since it re-clocks the signal internally or by an external clock and works from the PCIe bus to AES3. The problem is the computer is 25m away from the DAC, so a cable is necessary whether it's a 2 core shield or a fibre optic cable & complex array of the Adnaco PCIe bus extension. Simplicity favours the cable which can run to 100m, so that's plenty for I want to do.

 

I only will use the AES3 for 48, 96 and 192 PCM files. DSD is taken care of by DSD_DISC which is played by the SACD player as well as regular CDs. AES3 has its place, it is a lot less noisy than USB, properly clocked, the sound what you hear can yield very good results.

 

Nothing to do with the thread of course.