Mapman - with many people using aysnc USB the real time nature of the PC is minimal. All it really has to do is keep the buffer full and not get in the way of the aysnc USB requests. Filling the buffer is just not that hard. It is hard to understand how a computer with little else running other than the music player and with the CPU running at only a few percent of usage can have a significant effect on the timing of the aysnc USB over several minutes of music unless there is a serious flaw in the design of the player. There may be computer effects that influence wav and flac playback, but it seems that aysnc USB takes the real time aspect of the PC out of the equation. This is especially true for DACs that re-clock the data. Before async USB, the real time nature of the PC could definitely be an issue. But that seems minimal with async USB.
Converting Flac to Wav & Upconversion
I've seen Steve N. Recommend converting Flac to Wav a few times in the threads. Last night I downloaded DBPoweramp to give it a try. It worked great. Just took 16/44 Flac & converted to 16/44 wav. Then I noticed it offered upconversion capability... It was late, I should have been in bed an hour before, but I sat there and converted another flac file, setting it to upconvert to 24/192... Let it do its thing, hit play, heard music and when I looked up at my DAC, it said 24/192. It worked!. It was late, I had the volume on very very low, everyone was asleep. Sure, I'll listen and report, but 'm wondering if anyone else has tried this and found any sound quality difference between Flac Or Wav @ 16/44 vs upconverting the recording? I and I'm sure others would love to hear your experience, thanks in advance, Tim
Showing 2 responses by dtc
Mapman - async USB puts the timing and request under the control of the external device, not under the control of the PC. The USB device is optimized for that and does not have other functions to distract it. So, all the PC and player have to do is keep the buffer full, which it should be able to do without much problem. Other than that, the timing is controlled by the external device. Here is an explanation of how async USB works, from the guy who introduced it. Async USB |