DAC's and USB 3 (or higher)

Equipment / Electronics / Gear / Accessories DACs
21

Yes for playback I agree. But having wordclock issues or jitter issues for adc’s can make a pretty big difference

22

Assuming something is buffering the ADC output locally, it really shouldn’t matter.
USB device drivers largely exist in user mode on Windows, they are pretty hard to mess up.

One thing Windows is terrible at is guaranteeing latency for devices that don’t buffer, CNC controllers Using parallel ports being the obvious one. There are windows based CNC software that still recommend using XP because it’s slightly better in this regard.

But none of this matters here, there is no advantage to a usb3 device on paper for audio playback, but if it supports it, sure plug it in.

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23

Yes, if there is a buffer it shouldn’t matter. There have been times where there was still some bs going on though. I don’t really focus on hardware level stuff so idk what was going on but I had some issues with my adc not working properly with my interface and some clocking issues that made them sound off

24

World clock is also loose!
When it works over networking gear, then it is bound to its latencies and jitter.

Look at it like this:

  • A monitor has milisecond latency. Human vision is slow.
  • Audio needs 0.1ms at worst. Human hearing is faster for pinpointing direction
  • Home networking gear is 10s of micro seconds.
  • Good networking gear is <10 micro seconds. For example Cisco Catalyst 9200 series
  • Specialised networking gear is hundreds nano seconds. For example Arista 7150 series
  • At 4GHz, a CPU executes multiple instructions every 0.25 nano seconds.

Audio is SUPER loose timing wise.

25

That’s true, but it does matter for adc to get it right. I have my adc serving as my master clock and my interface serving as a slave, and that improves the performance of the adc when both devices are clocked separately (to my ears)

I do just let my dac clock itself though so there is not an issue there

26

Also having to deal with issues in our datacenters for work I am familiar how finicky networking can be lol

This is audio not networking gear (although you can mix both lol)

27

I have my schiit stack plugged into usb3 port, 0 issues.

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