Its 192K Degrees in here!


Recently I had a discussion with many of you regarding 192K software downloads from HD Tracks and Reference Recordings. I also have had discussions about with some of you with respect to ripping vinyl at 192K and playing it back – expecting it to sound more like vinyl, you see, because its 192K. As I stated many times before, 192K is just not ready for audiophile prime time. And unless you do some intensive lobbying at Texas Instruments, Anologue devices, Wolfson et.al., the wait will just get longer.

Digital audio, once you venture past your CD player, can make you down right dizzy. In our digital audio road show we do try to make you dizzy (more about our road show in an upcoming BLOG). We play music through USB and the Musiland Monitor 02. Then we ask, which one sounds better? Low and behold, it’s the Musiland, by like 100%. Then we try and play 192K through the PC. We use the MD 10 modified because it is: 1) a good DAC with great sound 2) probably one of the best 192K DACs that we have heard and 3) it displays the sampling rate right on the display. Low and behold, out of the few windows players that will actually play the 192K track, most of them down sample the music to a more USB friendly 48K. That’s because my friends, and I have said this over and over, native USB does not support anything greater than 48K.

Ok, you tell me you need to replace these drivers with async ones that support 192K. Two issues: 1) you need an async DAC to do this and 2) how many USB DACs do you know of that reliably support 192K USB (and I mean reliably) and sound good? If you do your research, you will find the pickens for USB based 192K rather slim.

Such is the problem with folks that spent their hard earned cash on the Amarra product, which looks like you could download it for free any day now. It’s great that Apple in the latest Snow Leapord releases will be supporting natively USB Async drivers that plug into Amarra. What’s not so great is that there is very few audiophile quality DACs that you can plug 192K USB into and get it to sound like you’re not listening in the latrine on a long Southwest flight.

The Musiland DACs are the only DACs that I have heard that can process 192K reliably from a Coax / BNC connection and sound good. ( As of 7/1/11, we do not offer any DACs via USB that can support 192K) After many conversations with Audio gd, we got them to drop their efforts at a 192K native USB DAC (and drop the USB port from the REF 7. The audio gd exception is the digital interface, which King Wa uses in conjunction with M2Tech HiFace). As a matter of fact, King Wa agrees, as I do, to drop the whole 192K thing all together until someone makes a decent 192K receiver chip.

Yet another problem with USB 192K, is the amount of EMI interference and latency that the PC introduces. Even with the Async drivers, keeping step is critical to keep jitter low. A missed or heavily damaged packet causes a “guess” by the DAC as to what the packet originally looked like. Because of the SPDIF conversion protocol does not allow for error re-transmit, the chance of getting anything close to 44.1K jitter levels at 192K is next to nil. And don’t try to convince me with the canard that your Benchmark DAC re-clocks jitter. While any cheap DAC can re-clock jitter, it cannot fixed the damage that jitter does to the music. Once the music packet is damaged, its damaged.

As of 7/1/11 the DIR 9001 remains the king of input receiver chips in terms of sound quality and jitter rejection. It has sounded the best for some 6 years now and I don’t see / hear anything new on the horizon. One caveat, the DIR 9001 only goes up to 96K.

See what I mean?


All the best,
Vic