Ayre Acoustics QX-5 Twenty – The Digital Hub

[rickca]

9 minutes ago, barrows said:

Ayre goes to great effort to produce their own, proprietary digital filters, which add performance to their DACs.  MQA requires that one use a digital filter developed by the MQA folks.  Right now the Ayre DAC implements its own filters in an FPGA chip: it may be possible to add MQA filters without having to compromise the Ayre filters, it may not be.  This will depend on how much room is left in the FPGA for more filter algorithms.

This is exactly why I want to understand what Berkeley did to implement the MQA renderer in their Alpha DAC Reference Series 2.  I really hope @mansr can get the code and figure it out.  Still more puzzling to me is why Berkeley even bothered doing it.  Chris has said he wishes I could talk to Berkeley about this.  Clearly he has done that and gotten a surprisingly positive message.

[rickca]

25 minutes ago, Charles Hansen said:

As you can see, there is far, far more to having a converter free from jitter problems than just paying $10 or $20 more for one of the Crystek oscillators that are advertised as being "femto clocks".

Thanks, Charles.  That's an excellent post and really puts things in perspective.

[rickca]

7 hours ago, Ryan Berry said:

the standard USB cables are very useful in diagnosing problems due to their consistency

Ryan, I went through exactly this with you.  I couldn't get the driver to install for my QB-9 and you suggested this troubleshooting step.  I was skeptical but I tried it.  The problem turned out to be the latest whizbang USB cable I had on loan from my dealer.

 

There aren't many companies whose President will take the time to write very complete answers like your posts in this thread.  Ayre is a class act.