[Christof]

I'm looking for a little advice from the tech gurus around here.  I've been on the fence about SB3 for a while now and would like to know if I could expect better performance out of a SB than from my Mac system?  I'm using a G5 desktop, sending wireless signal to an airport express then going into my preamp via digital optical cable.  I'm sending a digital signal the entire time and I have remote control and iTunes management with the Mac.  There might be a few more bells and wistles with the SB but what do you think about the sound quality?  If I connect an external HD via firewire into the desktop, have I not accomplished basically the same thing as a SB based front-end?

Thanks for any input
Christof

[mcgsxr]

What format are the files that you are broadcasting in?  AAIF?  FLAC etc?

[Christof]

I am importing in lossless but I cannot seem to find any way to determine what I'm broadcasting?  I assume it is the same?

[mcgsxr]

sure, I was just asking if you are using MP3, or another format that one might serve better than the other.

If you are presently using lossless PC based audio, I would not be looking to get an SB3, just to have one.

I really liked the stock one I had, sold it to my brother whose listening habits have dramatically changed due to the new accessibility, and I am anxiously awaiting one of the first fully modded Bolder SB3's...

Sounds to me like you have already achieved what the SB3 can do.

[Folsom]

Burr Brown's PCM2702 USB chip might be a solution?

"The PCM2702 is a single-chip USB DAC which features the feed-forward tracking system, which they’ve marketed as SpAct (Sampling Period Adaptive Controlled Tracking). This provides a stable, low-jitter clock for the audio for the rest of the DAC to work with. The DAC itself is built around a tried-and-true 8x oversampling delta-sigma DAC. Because the DAC is focused on audio quality, the PCM2702 is only designed to work at 48 kHz, 44.1kHz, and 32 KHz at 16-bit resolution."

I figure there may be a possibility of near Jitter free USB by forcing a clock cycle or some thing I am not usre.... Perhaps sending several packets and then taking and average?

http://www.hagtech.com/hagusb.html

http://www.headwize.com/ubb/showpage.php?fnum=3&tid=5924&fpage=9999

http://www6.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=139368

Hm I want to build the USB DAC from Hagerman now!

[Christof]

DoS

Thanks for the Head-Fi link, the folks over there have a great forum on computers as source, lots of Mac info.  I guess I was trying to figure out how to stay bit-perfect out of my computer and stay digital until an outboard DAC.  It appears that iTunes IS bit perfect if you disable a few of their presets and rip WAV or AIFF.



Thanks
cg

[konut]

Sorry to hijack the thread but your statement about iTunes and bit perfect ripping raised my curiosity. I posted that statement on the Roxio Toast Titanium 7 forum and got this response.

"No one on any public forum I'm aware of has any knowledge of what precisely iTunes's error correction consists of but whatever it is, it is not secure. Look at the results of the rip with iTunes I posted above...3 rips, 3 differing checksums. Case dismissed I'm afraid.
I imagine that some amount of rereading takes place but that the cache is not flushed between reads.

 Defeating audio caching is the key to security; it would seem to me that Apple, with their software/hardware integration would be in a great position to accomplish this and the fact that they introduced error correction at all shows they have some interest but sadly I think it's as far as they'll go."

My interest was in transcoding the bit perfect rip in WAV or AIFF to FLAC,  which TT7 is capable, of for use with the SB3. Do you have a link to the statement about which presets to disable to produce bit perfect rips?

[Christof]

http://www6.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=161013&highlight=itunes+bit+perfect

c.