GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Didital Things
In the Thread: Why I hate computer playback.

Post Subject: The computer audio gold standard... IMHOPosted by manisandher on: 8/20/2012

Hi Currawong, thanks for sharing your experiences.

My own computer playback journey goes back some 9-10 years ago when I started using a MOTU 896HD to interface a PC to my then Esoteric D70 DAC. And in the passing time the one thing I've learned about computer audio is that 'everything matters'. You can almost throw logic out of the window. For example, the type of hard drive you use to play music back from really shouldn't matter - it's just 1s and 0s after all - but it does!

I've never mentioned this on this forum before (it's too close to a recommendation), but in my experience there is a computer playback 'system' that is head and shoulders above all others. It is the Phasure XXHighEnd software player and the Phasure NOS1 DAC. (Just Google these for more info.)

But these are not for newbies to computer audio.

The XXHighEnd software only works on a PC (suits me fine), and being a true 'memory player' requires a powerful PC to perform at its best. But don't get me wrong here, when playing a track, the CPU usage is virtually zero. But the player does all necessary processing before playing and intermittantly needs to access this pre-processed information as it's playing - the more quickly it can do this, the better the sound quality. The confguration of XXHighEnd is pretty involved too until you get used to it.

Although any software player (PC or Mac) will work with the DAC, the NOS1 really is designed to be used with XXHighEnd. It's an R2R design utilizing eight BB PCM1704U-K chips. The idea here is to 'upsample' all 16/44.1 material to 24/705.6 in XXHighEnd and then feed this to the DAC via async USB (the only aysnc USB implementation that I'm aware of that is 24/768 capable). The DAC then does no upsampling, oversampling or delta-sigma modulation on the signal whatsoever - just a simple digital-to-analog conversion utilizing the 1704's highest data rate.

This is easily the best source I've ever had in my own system (putting the Pacific Microsonics Model Two to shame) or that I've ever heard at any show.

Oh, and I really don't mean this as a sales pitch (I have no vested interest in Phasure whatsoever), but feel that 'The Good Sound Club' really should know about it.

Mani.

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