Yes I do, but it doesn’t always make sense to do that (and while it may improve the sound, it’s not going to be as massive of a jump doing so, like assuming you have equal quality reclockers, and this is highly dependent on the setup anyways, if adding one gives a 100% improvement, adding the 2nd one in chain might give 120-150% total, it’s not going to double performance if you get what I’m saying. All depends. And you want to make sure the best ddc is the one that is last in the chain imo if you are chaining
Currently on my main desk I run USB from my pc to an Ideon 3R Master Time blackstar, which then via it’s usb out goes to a totaldac d1 digital mk2 reclocker, which then gets sent over to my aes distributor (which can reclock if I let it, but I found that in this case enabling it either gave no difference or felt slightly worse since I already had a better clocked signal). So PC (via usb) → Ideon (via usb) → totaldac (via aes) → ati (via aes) → DACs. In this setup, I can also take the streamer at my desk which is a dcs network bridge and run it into the totaldac via it’s aes in, so that improves the streamer as well.
Something interesting I’ve found is that while in my experience adding more unneeded or extra things in an analog signal path is seldom positive, chaining things together and multiple recolocking/regeneration/isolation in digital signals has actually been positive changes. So that’s been a weird trip tbh
On the idea of USB vs spdif formats, personally I’ve heard good results with both. Depends on the gear at hand, a well implemented usb can be further improved by a good usb streamer or reclocker, and same goes for using spdif/aes. So all depends on the design, and I wouldn’t make any blanket statements, just depends on your setups
I am going to try something absolutely stupid when I get one of the denafrips in I ordered along with the term (the gaia), which would be this chain
PC → iFi iUSB3.0 → JCAT USB Isolator → Teddy Pardo TeddyUSB → Ideon 3R Master Time Blackstar → Berkeley Alpha USB → ATI DDA212-XLR → Denafrips Gaia → Totaldac D1-Digtal-Mk2 → DAC
This is bound to either not work, provide no benefit, and is simply for experiment purposes and personal curiosity to how much shit I can chain in and what happens. I’m sure I could look around more of my house to find more shit to chain in (I guess I could throw my eventide h9000 in there for no reason whatsoever), but this is all for shits and giggles and not anything serious. Still want to try it though
Depending on the dac, sometimes it makes more sense to disable internal PLL or reclocking, sometimes it doesn’t. But typically with any high end dac, a moderately nice ddc/streamer/source will give some positive benefits. But on some of the really high end dacs, sometimes you might find the internal solution to give better results than your current digital source either because your digital source ends up being worse than what the dac can correct or do on it’s own, or it bypasses some sort of processing. But the majority of the time a nice digital source is an upgrade to most higher end dacs, with varying levels of quality jump