New 24/192 USB Transports are excellent

[jkeny]

so does the 24/192 work like dvd upscaling to 1080....

I'd be using apple lossless as a format... or at least I have been....

spent about three days putting the mammy-in-law's cd collection onto the ipod we got for christmas!!! tiresome! so I don't know that I could face into re sampling all of my own.....

No upsampling - it plays native 24/192 files - some 24/96 music (apparently not up-sampled from 16/44) is available on-line from a number of sites - see here https://www.hdtracks.com/index.php?file=9624albums

[jaybee]

this might be a



question; but

if you are using 16/44 files why do you use a 24/192 do-hickey....???

[jkeny]

this might be a



question; but

if you are using 16/44 files why do you use a 24/192 do-hickey....???

No, I said I'm using a specific 16/44 WAV to test & compare the different transports/DACs. It's true that most of my music collection is 16/44 (as I would expect to be the case for most people) BUT I've collected a handful of SACDs (which I intend to copy to disk - but that's another story) & I've collected a handful of high res files too. Also music is becoming offered in high-res, more & more (did you look at the HD site?). I didn't set out to particularly get a high-res transport/DAC that's just what these fine sounding units do.

[jaybee]

cool....

basically it's a "more" future-proof setup so....

I'll have to bear it in mind....

is it vastly superior to output the "raw" digital signal to a DAC this way (usb) rather than via an optical output...???

[jkeny]

cool....

basically it's a "more" future-proof setup so....

I'll have to bear it in mind....

is it vastly superior to output the "raw" digital signal to a DAC this way (usb) rather than via an optical output...???

SPDIF is the normal way transports are connected to DACS (USB is just how the transport connects with the PC). I2S is an alternative to & superior to SPDIF for connecting transport to DAC. The only problem is that there is no standard agreed for this & the length of the lines carrying the signal should be as short as possible. It's the signalling protocol used inside the DAC boxes for connecting one piece to another so is meant to be short.

That PCWave unit that Cloney demonstrated at the HiFi show in the RDS recently (missed it!) is supposed to connect between units in the range via I2S which is carried on HDMI cable.

[Derek]

http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/bo09/paul.html

I came across this article on 6 moons, in which Paul Candy rates the HiFace one of his finds of the year.

[jkeny]

Very good, Derek, thanks for that info but he is wrong on one point - M2Tech (the Italian company behind HiFace) were not the first to get 24/192 USB to work, Musiland (Chinese company) did it before them with an even cheaper $80 product. He hasn't heard my modded HiFace either - I may have said this before (senior citizen moment) I now know what the sound of low jitter is like - very good analogue :)

Update on my modding:
I'm doing a job on a Squeezebox receiver, as I mentioned above & my latest results are very promising. It's getting very close in sound to the modded HiFace but not here yet.

[jaybee]

you should start building your own...

o'face

or

ballymusic

look how many fuses got sold on here!!

[jkeny]

you should start building your own...

o'face

or

ballymusic

look how many fuses got sold on here!!

Funny you should say that - I have a couple of people asking me to do the mods for them on the HiFace & I'm considering doing it - anybody here interested so I can do them all at once? PM me if you are.

[Fran]

Hi all,


well myself and Derek had the pleasure of having a listen to this "yoke" in Ivors place last night. I brought my Pass D1 dac to do duty for the evening - even though its limited to 16/44. However, that's what most people will be using so I didn't feel too bad about that. We used John laptop as source (using wav files primarily) and Ivor's airtight amp and Quad 989 speakers.

Johns modded unit was actually quite neat, although he used some fairly large lithium polymer ion batteries to power the HiFace unit. It sounded wonderful, and I do mean wonderful. Absolutely lovely liquid sound, very analogue sounding. But the real areas of gain were at the frequency extremes. Bass was very very tight and treble clear and distinct with no harshness. Putting it simply, it sounded great. John himself said that as he progressed through the mods you could hear a haze being removed piece by piece... as he said himself, he now knows what jitter sounds like!

I believe John has a few more things to do to the unit, (essentially this was a prototype build) and I suppose the unit would want to be tried with a normal PC as source and with a variety of DACs.

Now do bear in mind this was a limited test. For example Ivor's CDP didn't have a digital out, so we couldn't compare the the hiface to an alternate CDP source. But personally I was impressed with the sound

Maybe Ivor or Derek could come in a comment here...





Fran