Could Monarchy DIP Combo improve my Logitech Touch

I think the question should rather be: "Would the Monarchy DIP Combo improve the Chord DAC64?" As DIPs tend to show the greatest improvement with DACs sensitive to transport and digital cable quality, but may otherwise be great (jitter reduction not their greatest asset).
Answering your question, yes, I believe it probably would based on my experience with Monarchy DIPs.

By the way, didn't you post this question already a few weeks ago?

I own the Touch and I just recieved on trial a Monarchy 48/96 upsampler DIP to see if the Touch digital output can be further improved.
I thought about the combo but I cant see what advantage the combo would bring if my Dac can process a 24 bit 96 khz signal.

Not sure if these units need some break in time, but most electronics do, so I will report back in about a week.

Rapogee,

I had the DIP combo inline between the Duet and a Havana DAC and could not tell much of a difference. When I replaced the Duet with the Touch I did a bit of A/B'ing with the DIP combo in then out of the chain and again I could not pick up a difference so I took it out of my system.

By the bye, the improvement from using the Duet receiver to the Touch as a digital transport to my DAC was significant improvement; which was quite surprising. I am interested in what Ozzy finds.

Those days when I had good transports, jitter was always an issue and plugging in the DTI by Audio Alchemy then and even the digital lense by Genesis was incredible.

I was just curious if the Logitech Touch, a digital format with no moving parts but not knowing how good the digital interface is would serve better in eliminating jitter issues and clock speeds of my DAC. I wonder how much demodulation is required or takes place from the incoming signal of my Touch going to my DAC?
I know they exist and would like to know if the Monarchy is necessary or will provide minimal use in the chain. I guess I have to get one and tried it out.

Would the Monarchy DIP Combo improve my Logitech Touch? I am not sure what type of jitter issues would the logitech transfer to my DAC (Chord DAC64)?
Any suggestion?
Rapogee

Rapogee, you might want to spend a little time & understand the (complex) Chord DAC64 before you ask such questions. The Chord DAC64 is a pretty kick-ass DAC even tho' it's not the lates & greatest audiophile widget out there.
Specifically, the DAC64 has the ability to buffer the music for 2 seconds or 4 seconds, which is exactly akin to asynchronous rate change. It uses a pretty deep FIFO (first in, first out) buffer before the digital music is feed into the DAC. It's a built in Monarchy DIP but much better. It looks like you are quite unaware of this handy feature! You need to read the manual & figure out how to turn on this feature.
Once this feature is on, adding an external jitter reduction/elimination box will/should have no effect.

Bombaywalla,

Thanks for responds and agreeing that my DAC is good since it is a pretty kick-ass DAC even compared to the once I have tested, ARC DAC8, Ayre USB Dac and a few others to name. I did contact Chord and discussed about the buffering capabilities and also the clarification about it being an upsampling dac or not and its ability to relock any data coming in at 44.1 and 96khz.
Thanks for the clarification, either way I trust I have to understand this better but with some of the discussion I have been seeing with reclocking and demodulation using different oscillators in the system to provide the correct synchrony between the Transport and Dac has give me some curiosity. I always thought that jitter can not be completely eliminated from the Transports end and that there are always room for improvements. You are probably right since even with the original Spectral DAC I had long ago, the Genesis Lens and all the interface out there did not make much of a difference since the Spectral took care of business as soon as it received its data.

Thanks again
I still should try it out and listen to my self once and laugh about it if I do get a chance to place it in the chain to see for myself.

I don't think the question is improving the dac, but the signal that is fed to it, specifically, here, the output of the touch. My berkley dac benefited from the monarch greatly. My benchmark did not benefit at all.

Well, I have now had the Squeezebox Touch playing through the Monarchy 48/96 Dip and then through my Cary 306 Pro Dac (24/96) for about 2 weeks .

The first few days I was convinced that the Monarchy unit was actually inferior to just running the Touch digital directly into my Cary Dac. I even called Monarchy asking if the unit requires some break in time. CC Poon said NO it is all digital "no breakin in time required".

Well, in my opinion it does need some break in. I let it play 24 hours a day for about 5 days playing a Purist Audio break in disc.

Now after 2 weeks I can say that the unit sounds much better. But I am not sure if it is still much of an improvement over just running the digital out from the Touch to my Dac.

Sometimes, I think there is a difference in the bass and soundstage presentation, but after switching back to the Touch direct to my Dac there was no loss of any improvements.

So, perhaps there needs to be more break in time, perhaps the Touch digital signal is so good that the Monarchy Dip is not necessary.
I will give it a few more days.

Anyone else have any thoughts or suggestions?

I will add that I am using a Morrow Dig4 cable to my Dac and Illuminati D60 from the Touch to the Monarchy Dip.

So, perhaps there needs to be more break in time, perhaps the Touch digital signal is so good that the Monarchy Dip is not necessary.
I will give it a few more days.

Anyone else have any thoughts or suggestions?

it might be that the Squeezebox & DIP need more breakin time but....
OK, there were 2 Monarchy products - let's see if I get this right ;-) - the 24/96 interface processor & the 48/96 which was an upsampler.
The 48/96 product that you have is an upsampler that uses the Cirrus Logic CS8420 receiver as a standalone unit. OTOH, the 24/96 product is designed specifically to reduce jitter & amplify the digital signal.
Monarchy claims both products to be asynchronous & in a way they are: the CS8420 has an on-board PLL that is used to recover clock from the incoming data stream. By using a precision clock reference for the PLL, the PLL can clean up the jitter from the incoming data & reclock the data using its cleaner clock as the reference. Note that in sort of scheme jitter is reduced to as low as the PLL clock reference is & no lower. In much more expensive jitter reduction units, a 2nd precision clock reference is used to encode the outgoing data so that this outgoing data is on a totally different clock domain where the jitter can be carefully controlled. Such hi-end jitter reduction devices often use a FIFO to do the job, which the Monarchy DIP products do not.
So, the jitter reduction capability of the Monarchy 48/96 might be limited & the Squeezebox Touch input might be at the limit of what the DIP 48/96 can do?
I was reading JA's measurements of the SB Touch-jitter performance looked OK to me. The way JA did his jitter measurements was that he wanted to see how much suppression to added jitter the SB Touch was capable of. So, he added a (slow) 229Hz sq wave to the LSB i.e the 16th bit of a 16-b word of the 11.025KHz sine. The effect of adding the 229Hz is what we would call a dither & here it is forcefully adding jitter so that 11.025KHz is not precisely 11.025KHz anymore. Then, JA looked to see what the SB Touch was capable of doing in terms of extracting the 11.025KHz at the analog output & yet suppressing all the 229Hz harmonics. This would be possible only if the SB Touch had implemented a good jitter reduction scheme. -122dB - (-6dB)= -116dB suppression of the 229Hz harmonics, which is not bad at all for a $299 unit. So, the SB Touch's jitter performance is quite good to start off with & it might be at the limit of the DIP 48/96 unit.
I also have a feeling that you probably need the DIP 24/96 (jitter suppressor) unit more than you need DIP 48/96 (upsampler) unit. Many people use both in tandem - 24/96 followed by 48/96 & then into your DAC. This upsamples a low jitter signal & it gets a 2nd chance for jitter reduction.
I found similar jitter performance plots for the SB Touch on computeraudiophile.com:
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/Logitech-Squeezebox-Touch-Review.
search for the word "jitter" & you'll come to the 05/28/2010 post by JR_Audio. He's posted 3 JPEG graphs for the SB Touch jitter performance. Very similar to JA's.

If you read the (lengthy) set of posts on the SB TOuch you'll see that many people are buying upgraded power supplies & junking the provided switched-mode wal-wart power supply 'cuz it's just too noisy. A good old-fashioned linear regulator is much quieter & will probably also help the overall jitter performance (it will allow you to realize the SB Touch designed jitter suppression performance). It is possible that the wal-wart supply is so noisy that it is adding hash to the music signal & creating an artificial noise floor + creating digititis for you. Needless to say, Logitech did manuf this unit to a price-point hence several compromises & it should be no surprise that you need to spend more money to actually make it a higher-fi unit......
Just my rambling 2 cents FWIW....

Bombaywalla, Thanks for the info and the help.
I have considered trying an upgraded power supply but did'nt because I have the Squeezebox Touch's walwart power supply plugged into my Synergistic Powercell 10SE.

By the way, the 24/96 unit has been discontinued. Only the 48/96 upsampler/jitter reducer and the new Combo units are available.