Got mine now for a couple of days and i'm loving it. What a nice little piece of hardware. Listening to some Billie Holiday Recording from 1957 as i write.
Via USB, because then both devces are galvanically isolated on either side. I use I2S on the DAC for my CD-Transport.
Depends on dac. I prefer usb, because it uses dacs clock and has less jitter. I hear good things about aes, but have not used it.
I've tried both AES and USB and couldn't hear any difference. I've decided to sell my AES cable and keep it connected via USB in order to use the clock in the Z10 DAC. If you have a source higher than 192k, then stick with USB.
The Z10 has a FPGA to "Refine the Clock" over I2S, what ever this means in the marketing brochure. A FPGA can contain many things as this is a custom chip, it may use the OCXO or the good mood from the listener, who knows, this is nowhere documented.
Not sure this helps, but what I do............ I have everything except optical going from my T8 to my LAIV µDDC, AES, USB, I2S, and Coax. The µDDC feeds my µDAC via I2S. I can then pick any of the 4 from my µDDC to go to the µDAC and experiment. And I have more to do to pick a winner, but in general I find them all pretty close
that"s because no matter what, and how, you take out of the t8, it gets re-routed and re-clocked to i2s by the µDDC...
Well I believe that is the idea ! NO ? I also believe there is an option on the clocking that can be picked on the µDDC, but have not got into that. But even before I put the µDDC in, any differences bewteen the options on the µDAC were marginal. You might feel oned is better or worse that the other, but it is not earth shattering.
You are almost right. 1. the differences are so subtle (if there at all), that the human hearing fails to detect them 2. the clocking has a different aspect to it: with synchronous connections like i2s, s/pdif (both optical and wire-coaxial) and the like, send the clock along with the audio signals on the same wire. Although modernly speaking this is no more kind of a big source of problems, the one wire exposed to interference (EMI / RFI etc) exposes a very weak point of failure: possible disruptions in the clock signal; along with the distortion- of the signals. With asynchronous connections, such as USB UAC2, you don't suffer such problems because: a) the data is fetched at the source by the DAC when-it-sees-fit, and if its checksum is invalid due to interference, it is fetched again b) such data is thens internally re-clocked before being used (that is, converted to analog, as we are talking about a DAC) Although not important (as in non-hearable) USB also accepts higher sample rates than s/pdif. Long story short: if you can, always go USB HTH Cheers, Al.
