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WHITE PAPER
USB DAC GUIDE TO COMPUTER-AUDIO | 12.2015 | 2
An USB DAC is designed to give you access to a wide range of music stored on a
PC / Mac or NAS (network attached storage) drive through your home computer
network.
The computer will get connected to the rear USB-B connection for a direct
transmission of the digital audio.
The USB-B connection is the recommended way for music lovers to enjoy their
digital music in the best quality possible.
The USB-DAC – “Digital to Analogue Converter” in fact replaces the soundcard of
your PC / Mac and directly converts the digital music signal to analogue domain
to hand it over to the amplifier.
The USB-B connection can be found on a wide variety of our products, as
dedicated USB-DACs, Network Audio Players, CD-Players or even integrated
Amplifiers.
But first let’ s dig a bit more into the dierent ways of accessing music to
get a better understanding and clarify some terminology. When you finish the
document you will have all the information you need to get the best audio perfor-
mance from your music stored on a computer via a USB DAC.
DIGITAL CONNECTIONS
You might discover two dierent USB ports depending on the feature set of your
USB DAC.
The first of these (USB-A) is conveniently placed on the front so you can plug in
a USB key, a Smartphone or a portable HDD. This is a synchronous connection
and is the simplest method of implementing USB audio from portable devices.
Attention this one is not supported by all USB-DACs.
CD-Player with USB-A connection on the front pannel.
This is a USB-A port.
The Second USB-B port on the rear panels is for connecting a PC or Mac directly,
and supports not only PCM signals up to 384 kHz/32bits, but also DSD2.8MHz,
5.6MHz and 11.2MHz for maximised versatility.
This is a USB-B port.
This is the connection we will explain
in this document in more details.
Using the USB-B connection will bypass your Computer audio board (soundcard)
to directly access the high quality audio processing on the external USB-DAC.
There are other technologies to it, such as “asynchronous mode” and “bit-trans-
parent mode”, but this will be explained at a later stage when we are going to
explain how to use this connection and how to get the best audio quality. Another
big benefit of this computer to DAC connection is that there is no file format
limitation, as everything playing on your PC / Mac media player will be repro-
duced by the USB DAC, as long as it is a stereo signal in PCM or DSD.
Just to complete the list of digital inputs we need to mention here the optical
and the coaxial digital connection. By these an USB DAC can be used as high
end DAC as well for other devices with this type of digital output, for example
an Apple TV / set top boxes or other device, to dramatically increase their audio
performance. On the image below you can see these inputs together with the
USB-B input on the right.