Coaxial v. USB to RCA
Comments
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The Musiland is better than most soundcards because it's completely isolated from the computer environs. Also the the only limiting factor of USB is the max of 24/96 otherwise any competently designed USB dac or converter will have more musical advantages.
H9"Appreciation of audio is a completely subjective human experience. Measurements can provide a measure of insight, but are no substitute for human judgment. Why are we looking to reduce a subjective experience to objective criteria anyway? The subtleties of music and audio reproduction are for those who appreciate it. Differentiation by numbers is for those who do not".--Nelson Pass Pass Labs XA25 | EE Avant Pre | EE Mini Max Supreme DAC | MIT Shotgun S1 | Pangea AC14SE MKII | Legend L600 | BlueSound Node 3 - Tubes add soul! -
I understand. going back to your choices, I looked at musicland monitor 02 and HRT. I really wanted to try the Youlong but the only source was chaina and it seam to me compliacted if I didn't like it to try to return it.
I did lots of investigation and at the end decided to hold on my decision, until I see a reasonable DAC that can do what I wanted it to do.
in my setup, I found HRT and musicland not usefull because I wanted to go direcly to self power spakers, and not user a receiver/pre then amp then spakers, I wanted a simpler setup. PC-> DAC-> self power speakers.
The problem I run into was not volume control with the musicland and HTR.
I was really loking forward to the youlong but no one in the US sells this unit.
Another thing I like from the youlong (at least looking at this unit on paper)is that all connections are in the back, with the HRT and musicland both ends have connections and it just seam messy and pron to kinks, specially with the HRT that has the sampling light in the front and you kind of wanted to see that...
Anyway in my price range and footprint I would have chosen the youlong.
Other things to consider, The musicland because it has its own power supply and no on/off switch then the unit is always on, the HRT is only on when it get power from the PC, which I really liked.
sound qulity I think both the musicland and HRT are very capable and I don't think you will notice a big difference between both of them.
On the other hand the musicland has optical/coax out which is more flexible in case you wanted to use optical form the DAC to your receiver.Current HT setup
Mains: B&W 804s
Center: Polk CSi5
Surround: Polk FXi3
Sub: Velodyne DLS-3750R
Receiver: Pioneer SC-07
Amplifier: Sunfire TGA5200
TV: Sony KDS60A2020
DBP: Sony DBP-S350
CDP: Pioneer DV-48AV
Interconnect cables: SignalCable analog II
speaker cables: SignalCable Ultra Speaker Cables Bi-wire -
There does'nt seem to be a consensous on the sonic benifits of upsampling but it can be benificial in regards to jitter reduction.Since the data is effectively reclocked by the sample rate convertor IC it in turn (in theory atleast)sends jitter free upsampled data to the D-A chip.This may prove benificial for instance with a less than ideal SPDIF source.I see no need for up-sampling. -
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The Musiland is better than most soundcards because it's completely isolated from the computer environs. Also the the only limiting factor of USB is the max of 24/96 otherwise any competently designed USB dac or converter will have more musical advantages.
H9
I wouldn't paint all internal sound cards with such a wide brush.
I would be interested in comparing the HRT/Musiland to the 1212M. From all the positive feedback in the Pro-Mastering forums E-Mu seems to have done it right. I would like to get one of each.
It's an issue of trade offs. One of them being that an internal sound card doesn't have to deal with the short comings of USB. One of those being latency. Also if you are a fanatic about Jitter the internal sound card wins there also.
