At first I was confused because I wanted to purchase a streamer without a dac or what is described as a stand alone streamer. But in researching what you have posted here on this thread am I to understand that all streamers have an internal clock? And if this is true, you have also led me to believe that a asynchronous USB cable should be used as an interconnect from the streamer to the DAC instead of a I2S cable?
I have a custom built Revelation Audio Labs Prophecy Cryosilver Reference HDMI/I2S cable coming from my Shenling ET3 CD Transport to my Laiv Harmony µDAC and was going to use that I2S cable from a streamer to my DAC. But because of what you have written below, now I understand to get an asynchronous USB cable instead. Correct?
Thank you for these explanations of the differences between a asynchronous USB, a synchronous USB and a I2S cable when trying to get the best response from a streamer to DAC interface.
If the connection is IIS (I2S) then that clock is transmitted from the streamer to the DAC in the cable. If your streamer’s clock is better than the DAC’s, and you have a first class cable, your SQ will improve. Similarly with Coax and Toslink the clocking is to some extent dependent on the streamer, hence SQ will depend to a greater or lesser extent on the streamer in addition to the DAC.
If you use Asynchronous USB the SQ is probably unaffected by the streamer as the data is read by the DAC, on request, into a first-in-first-out buffer (a chunk of RAM) and is strobed into the actual dac chips by the DAC’s clock. So the analog output is isolated from timing errors (jitter) from the digital source.