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PostPosted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 6:30 am 

Joined: Tue Aug 30, 2011 1:13 am
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Just about to order one of these @ 200 UK Pounds - they are top quality british made USB audio DAC's with DC coupled output direct from the DAC and low pass filtered at 153KHz @ -3db. They use the TI PCM5102 DAC. See the data sheet below

http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/pcm5102.pdf

Image

Will update this thread with the results when installed.


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PostPosted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 3:23 pm 
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Ok I'm curious! Also about latency etc.


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PostPosted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 7:48 pm 

Joined: Fri Nov 23, 2012 4:34 pm
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I'm also interested to know what your results will be.
The datasheet suggests that the chip can deliver 2.1V RMS output?


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PostPosted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 8:49 pm 

Joined: Tue Aug 30, 2011 1:13 am
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Not sure if the below feature will cause any issues with Stereo Tool fm output, but this is a new feature with version 2 of the Meridian Explorer hardware. I won't be able to test the latency as I use the DSP version of Stereo Tool. The hardware does include ASIO drivers as well.

MERIDIAN APODISING FILTER
Filters are critical in digital audio. Commonly they introduce distortion and harshness because of "pre-ringing". Early digital recordings suffer from harshness too, due to primitive filters. After painstaking research, Meridian developed a special filter that avoids pre-ringing, so it can be steeper, cleaning up the effects of early filters. The result: a better, cleaner sound from recordings old and new.

Meridian Explorer allows for native 24/192 audio streams via USB and upsamples & apodises any 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz audio stream


Wikipedia explanation of the above:
Apodization in digital audio
An apodizing filter can be used in digital audio processing instead of the more common brickwall filters, in order to avoid the pre-ringing that the latter introduces.


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PostPosted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 10:39 pm 

Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2009 2:54 pm
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Location: Finland
Is ASIO any good if the input is not on the same interface?


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PostPosted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 12:47 am 
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Quote:
Is ASIO any good if the input is not on the same interface?
Not for low latency. You'll have synchronization problems that need to be fixed and that requires extra latency. Also you can only use 1 ASIO driver in a program, so either input or output would not be using it.


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PostPosted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 2:35 pm 

Joined: Tue Aug 30, 2011 1:13 am
Posts: 29
Quote:
Ok I'm curious! Also about latency etc.
Initial impression since installing the device are very good. No calibration is required for tilt adjustment and so far the frequency response is flat from 20Hz to 60 KHz. as measured on air with my Pira 75 FM analyser.

I do have the option in Windows sound properties to set the sample rate to 16 bit 176.4KHz. Is this better than setting the output to 24bit 192KHz?

After monitoring now for a few hours my peak deviation (Using the Baron Preset on ST 7.42) has not gone above 76 KHz - I have also found that the midrange harshness I sometimes got has now gone and has a much more refined sound overall. I can't test the latency as I am using the DSP version within SAM Broadcaster.

Before the New DAC I was using the Realtek ALC-887 HD onboard audio with lots of tilt calibration needed.


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PostPosted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 9:28 pm 
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Great! 176.4 and 192 are basically identical for the purpose, 176.4 has a slightly lower CPU load because it needs to process a bit less data.


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