Popular Post JohnSwenson Posted November 27, 2018 Popular Post Share Posted November 27, 2018 I have done same tests that Gordon did and get similar results. Under some conditions you can get lots of data errors (many per second) with USB audio, under other conditions you can get no errors for days. The biggest correlation I got was with cable length. With a cable greater than 3m you have pretty good chance of getting a large number of errors. Under 2m errors are few and far between (days between errors). Between 2m and 3m is where the fun happens, you can trade off cable length and cable quality. For example with Supra cables you can go with significantly longer cables than cheap cables. In this range hardware has significant impact. For example my SuperMicro motherboard is error free with longer cheap cables than my cheap laptop. I also did a lot of listening to the audio with different error rates on the USB. At low error rates the sound is identical. As error rates increase you start hearing the infamous clicks and pops. If you are getting say a click per minute, the sound quality in between clicks doesn't change. As the clicks come more often they get so annoying its impossible to tell if the sound quality is changing or not. At some point the errors come so often the system just shuts down, it can't handle that many errors. (a 5m cheap cable has a high probability of doing this). So my conclusion was that if you stay with cables less than 2m you can be pretty sure you are essentially error free. These rare bit errors do not seem to cause any sound change (other than a possible click). John S. Arpiben, beerandmusic, Currawong and 1 other 1 3 Link to comment
Popular Post JohnSwenson Posted November 28, 2018 Popular Post Share Posted November 28, 2018 1 hour ago, botrytis said: Digital data is digital data. What makes music different from ANY OTHER DIGITAL DATA STORAGE AND TRANSMISSION? I can tell you that my scientific instruments put out WAY more data in 1 min than any song has and there is no issues with data corruption, unless the HD goes or memory problems. You seem to think that music is special, it is not. Data is data. If USB was so bad for corruption it would not be used for data transfer in the scientific realm. You obviously no not what you are talking about. There actually IS a difference. Music uses isochronous transmission which has NO error correction. Most other forms of data use transmission protocols which DO have error correction, thus transmission errors get corrected so the end user never sees an error. With music there is no correction so transmission errors DO show up at the DAC. Per my previous post transmission errors are very rare with shorter cables, but do happen a LOT with longer cables. So while in some sense data is data, how music data gets sent over USB is very different. John S. beerandmusic and Teresa 1 1 Link to comment
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