I did make one prototype SB with a 5V power umbilical on it for one customer. Have not heard back from him though.
Steve N.
Hi,
Steve was very kind to build a "special" SB for me to test with my older Off-Ramp Turbo 2 (I know, I have to try a newer OR-5 someday, but priorities in a family are often on so many other "useful" acquisitions...). So I have tested it by connecting a USB cable to a nettop PC (Shuttle XS35GT) running XP and a laptop MacBook Pro under Win7 (great piece of hardware!). With 5m Belkin gold USB cable I get some detection errors on the laptop, but with a shorter 1.8m it works well. I feed 5V to the small connector at the end of a custom short umbilical on the SB output side using an external power supply with success on the nettop but without success on the laptop (actually the device is in the list but the driver does not load properly). For the laptop, I need to use a USB power only cable (one side USB-A, other side DC-jack) connected to a second USB port of the same laptop in order to have the OR-2 recognized.
After OR-2 detection, I can pull the 5V power cable without major effect on sound quality and it continues to work for a few songs, but when fiddling with playlists under Foobar with different file locations, formats or bit rates at some point the connection gets lost and I have to reconnect the 5V cable and power cycle the OR-2 to get it to reconnect. This connection loss also occurred (although rarely) when the 5V was still connected but in an unpredictable way (I have no clue). When I2S signal is lost, my DAC automatically selects the alternate SPDIF input.
In my setup, using the SB generates a more "relaxed" sound, but the downside is that it doesn't create a totally bullet-proof solution with my OR-2 (read bad WAF when no sound can be heard and read potentially dangerous when the volume knob on the amp gets frenetically turned all the way to max and inadvertently left there...).
Maybe I should mention that I recently discovered the real potential of Steve's Synchro Mesh in my setup (with upgraded power supply and good SPDIF cable) which allows me and my entire family to enjoy first class sound quality from virtually any source including highly functional and ergonomic media center software solutions, simply by re-clocking the TV's optical output (which means no more critical USB connection for audio and its mind-nagging performance sensitivity to USB cable, software player, file format converter, interference from spinning hard disc, CPU load, thread priorities, services running in background, power supply noise, common-mode data noise, etc. that sadly and audibly affects most USB converters and DACs).
Thumbs up, Steve, for a nice solution to a properly identified and unexpected source of jitter, although I wouldn't recommend to add OR-2 to the list of fully compatible devices, even with the custom modification that you so kindly implemented for me.
Best, /patrick