I have an older Arcam D33 dac that will accept usb 2 but it’s not isolated galvanically, so should I use usb or spdif out from the pulse mini for best quality or does it all come from the same point in the pulse mini and makes no difference.
Pulse mini- usb or coax spdif
- Thread starter Phill r
- Start date
That's an interesting one Phill.
The D33 Dac is a pretty excellent dac for its time; I was working for Arcam when it was in production and sold quite a few of them, It has a unique to dacs at the time chipset called DICE , all input signal's are routed through the chip which reclocked internally and it made the inputs more or less equal performance in use,
I expect the USB will offer the best performance, but it is of course, worth trying both methods of connecting it, I would be interested to hear your thoughts if you do try both as I have been looking at 2nd hand D33s and I'm thinking of getting one again.
https://ke9ns.com/TCD2210.pdf
The D33 Dac is a pretty excellent dac for its time; I was working for Arcam when it was in production and sold quite a few of them, It has a unique to dacs at the time chipset called DICE , all input signal's are routed through the chip which reclocked internally and it made the inputs more or less equal performance in use,
I expect the USB will offer the best performance, but it is of course, worth trying both methods of connecting it, I would be interested to hear your thoughts if you do try both as I have been looking at 2nd hand D33s and I'm thinking of getting one again.
https://ke9ns.com/TCD2210.pdf
Wow! Thanks for taking the time! It’s still a really excellent dac and I’m comparing to chord qutest with lpsu to the D33 and the D33 is more musical, weighty and does not lose out on the micro details of the qutest. Your explanation of the signal clocking makes sense as I can’t really tell the difference between usb and coax, if pushed usb might have a bit more presence. I’ve only had it a week and it’s been stored for the last 7 yrs so as new really!
Thanks Niall
Thanks Niall
Further to this, keep in mind that galvanic isolation is a bit of a buzzword that mainly lends itself to situations where you are using a very noisy USB source, a problem which you are bypassing to begin with by using a dedicated streamer (rather than a big desktop PC, for example). Also keep in mind we can do some slightly more clever things with USB regarding latency and the overall available bandwidth, and we'd argue that USB has greater potential than SPDIF.
