DIYINHK Isolated XMOS 768kHz DXD DSD512 review anywhere?

[wushuliu]

I have one sitting around. Got it last year. Go with whichever is cheapest. I didn't find that much difference between it and F1. And although I haven't kept up as much with these boards, I have read that the new Amanero boards are as good if not better. So that may be another option.

 

What's most important is the quality of the power supply to these boards.

[wushuliu]

I don't use it anymore. I took a different route and then scaled back on all the tweaking.

 

Amanero384 I believe, like what the LKS 100 uses. That's as much as I know. I never followed the Amanero development closely, just read comments about it every now and then.

[wushuliu]

21 minutes ago, barrows said:

Yes, the oscillators are on the clean side, but I see no indication that there any flip flops for re-clocking.  Looking at the photo it appears the PCB traces going to the I2S outputs go directly from the isolators to the output.  This means no re-clocking on the clean side.  It also appears that the masterclock output itself comes through the isolators instead of a direct feed form the oscillators.  This is not the best way to do it.  You want to have it like this:

 

USB receiver-isolator-Clocks and re-clocking (via Potato Flip Flops)-I2S output.

 

I do not see the re-clocking chips on the clean side.  Without having the unit here I cannot be absolutely certain, but zooming in on the available pictures it sure looks this way to m, and DITINHK makes no mention of re-clocking, just that the clocks are on the clean side, this is not enough to achieve low jitter. as both the XMOS chip and the isolators add substantial timing error.

 

Agreed - flips flops do wonders after - but who offers similar boards/functionality with flip flops? The only person I can think of is someone over at diyaudio - and his boards aren't cheap IIRC.

[wushuliu]

2 minutes ago, barrows said:

If you want to have good performance, then you need to have re-clocking after the isolators, simple as that.  With this interface you are probably better off choosing the more affordable non-isolated version from DIYINHK, and giving it a very good power supply, at least then you will not have an additional ~200 pS of jitter contributed by the isolators.

 

Best option I know of for good isolated interfaces is an Amanero combined with an ACKO (AKX-SO3) or Twisted Pear Audio (Cronus/Hermes) reclocking set up.  

 

They can still sound great even without the flip flops IMO, but the flip flops do take things to another level. I'm guessing the OP is funds limited in which case you're probably right they can get the non isolated board.

 

Power supply is the most important element anyway, so better to get that part right before anything else.

[wushuliu]

57 minutes ago, carlmart said:

I am not so sure power supply is the most important element, as long as they are all linear, particularly the one powering the XMOS, which shouldn't be DC-DC.

 

As barrows said, the PS is critical. Not just any old linear for best quality. It sounds like you're just dipping your foot in so I'd rather not overwhelm you as it's a rabbit hole when it comes to these components. If you're into diy get the DIYINHK and you can play around more with external power and making/adding your own potato flip flop. If you want to keep it simple, the Singxer is a good start. 

 

The route I took was to use ethernet to a heavily modded Oppo DB 103 which fed a Soekris DAC using coax/WM8804 to I2S with a Potato flip flop. Lol. That sounds ridiculous just reading it.

 

Anyway Now I'm just using a $100 dac to headphones and IFI USB paraphenalia. Had to take a break from the all the DIY.