Musical Fidelity V-Link

[sburrell]

According to Wikipedia, it's MPEG-LA that own the intellectual property rights, and they levy a 25¢ fee for each equipped device - Sony, Apple, Texas Instruments were amongst the funders of its development.

Apparently, FireWire is also more expensive to implement. But the latter is obvious, if you know anything about the technology - it's superior in every way when compared to USB, but also more complex. In brief: USB=VHS, FireWire=Betamax.

The only reason USB is on everything is because it's cheaper, not superior. And because it's on everything, everything gradually migrated towards using it, despite its inferiority. Heck, even Apple stopped providing FireWire cables for its iPods and offered USB cables instead, even though FW transfer of data meant much faster copying of files - they wanted the PC-user market. Mice and keyboards on PCs used to have dedicated PS/2 ports, and these allowed mice to be run at far higher polling rates (and therefore offer smoother and more accurate operation than USB). But now, it's all USB (you can increase the polling rate of your USB ports, but at the high risk of introducing instability in other attached peripherals).

AFAIK, USB 3 has all the same failings as USB 2 (eg. uses CPU cycles to manage data transfer - FireWire manages itself independently of host's CPU). Thunderbolt, USB 3's competitor, is similarly superior, but is once again more expensive to implement - but it can do things that USB 3 can only dream of.

*shrug* The best things in this world often go ignored for the weakest of reasons.

EDIT: from what I can uncover, FireWire has good jitter recovery built in as a result of employing something called Data Strobe Encoding. I can find very little information on USB's timing properties, and what little I can find that seems to refer to it is not wholly positive.

[DSJR]

Thanks for that. Then it seems a USB - SPDIF/Optical interface box may well be the best option for audio. I'll have to look up the one suggested to me...

I've just nicked this recommendation from the Audiosmile forum - hope they don't mind...

http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/UCA202.aspx

[sburrell]

According to the designer John Westlake, my new DacMagic's major weakness:

is the TDA1315 – the SPDIF input receiver. The TDA1315 has very poor jitter performance – despite claims otherwise from Philips ... If possible, modifying the unit to “clock-lock” with the transport will bring enormous improvements – then the quality of the Dac becomes the limiting factor.

Would inserting a V-Link between the computer and the DacMagic improve matters? Just for future reference.