Maxxwire

I store music files for my late 2014 Mac mini on a Samsung 850 EVO SSD housed in a Thunderbolt enclosure that I bought on Amazon. Assembly was incredibly simple requiring only a single screwdriver which is supplied with the kit.

Thank you ever so much Winston...

A few years ago I moved into a 30 year old house. After I connected my audio system up exactly as it had been before the move I noticed that it now had a distortion to the sound which at the time I described as 'sour'. Back then I had been using a Conrad Johnson MV-52 Tube Amp for about 4 years and this newly distorted sound became very disturbing to me. In desperation I tried to figure out what had changed to cause this change and eventually I realized that most likely the difference was the single wall outlet that the audio equipment was now using. After removing the original construction grade 'zip'n clip' outlet from the wall this is what I found... After replacing the 30 year old corroded outlet the entire audio system immediately returned to the wonderful sound that I had been used to enjoying from it for so many years.

Chris- Thank you very much for your opinion about Kato's original post as it helps me to feel that he may have read my responses concerning my positive personal experiences with optical toslink. I just wanted to thank you for Computer Audiophile and finally having a chance to share my first few posts after participating as a read only viewer for a year. Julf- I must say that you have a very creative mind. If your not active in politics you should be because you could run one heck of an effective campaign with your ability to spin anything in any in any way you want it to go! I have been posting on audio related websites on the internet for many years and I realize when I'm in a spiraling conversation that has no possible chance of resolution. So I have decided to let the readership consider the actual real world experiences which I have already posted in the thread demonstrating that both I and the publisher in chief of the original audio equipment evaluation magazine have had with his chosen reference S/PDIF cable that he uses to evaluate digital audio equipment with for the readership to consider as I will no longer feel the need for me to be posting to this thread. I want to thank you for being such a gentleman and according me such a warm welcome as a brand new member making his very first few posts here at Computer Audiophile.

Even though I am now suspecting that Kato from Vancouver who still only has 1 post on the forum may have been troling when he brought up the subject of jitter and toslink cables here is an example of how a highly respected usb dac like the Benchmark can have its sound quality improved enhanced using an optical toslink cable. John Atkinson who has been a professional audio equipment reviewer both in England and the United States for over 30 years reported that he was able to not in theory or opinion, but in actual demonstration elicit these significant sonic improvements when he used his go-to reference S/PDIF cable to enable the $169 Musical Fidelity V-Link to improve the sound of the Benchmark DAC over the optical toslink connection "I then changed to the V-Link, had it feed the Benchmark via a 1m length of AudioQuest Optilink-5 glass TosLink cable, and did not touch the Benchmark's volume control. The violins in the Sibelius were now slightly less steely, the soundstage a tad wider and deeper. More important, the sounds of individual instruments, such as the horns at the start of the first movement, and the timpani and plucked double basses at the start of the second, were slightly more of a piece with the surrounding acoustic."

Eloise- I understand why you are asking and I am not offended in the least. I have no affiliation with nor am I a representative of any business. The reason I mentioned the the composition of the optical conductor material so many times in the post is to call attention to the fact that it is not the common place molded plastic fiber material that is used for the conductor in the very poor sounding and virtually ubiquitous toslink cables that most people are familiar with. I am just a fellow audio hobbyist and music lover who is hoping to be able to share my greatest discovery in digital audio since I bought my first outboard dac 12 years ago. The day I bought my Theta DAC back in 2000 they very clearly instructed me to use its electrical coax input and not its optical toslink input. Unfortunately the cd player I had at the time had only a digital optical output I needed to find a toslink optical cable that was more on par with the many great digital coax cables which were readily available. In 2002 after many months of searching on the internet I found the glass toslink for 1/2 price that I am still using today. As I said earlier I removed the 6 MHz bandwidth plastic fiber optical toslink that I was using and replaced it with the 30 MHz bandwidth glass toslink and for the first time I was able to hear my favorite music clearer than I ever had before without its harmonic structure being muddled by the low 6MHz bandwidth of the molded plastic conductor that I had just replaced which up until that time I thought was the only kind that was available. Just 1 year ago I got a USB-S/PDIF Converter for the first time and that was when I first became familiar with Computer Audiophile. It didn't take long to find out that the members here have a high appreciation for the very best sounding digital music. After registering back in July it took another couple of months to work up the courage to post about the glass toslink which I found works as amazingly well with both of my USB-S/PDIF converters as it did with the audio alchemy i2s Bus processors and Theta DAC in my conventional conrad-johnson powered vacuum tube audio system. My only purpose on this thread is to positively respond to Kato's statement that "I have read that the Toslink is subject to jitter (even though the DAC may deal well with this jitter I'd rather remove it altogether) and the USB section of the DAC is not worth dealing with (as indicated by Simaudio)" with my own decade long experience with a very obscure kind of optical glass toslink that improved the sound of my music playback in a way that no other S/PDIF has been able to.

I hope that you are not inferring that digital transmission using S/PDIF isn't completely riddled with the possibility of data/timing corruption because I was reading on another thread here at CA which instructs people to completely avoid S/PDIF because even going through just a few feet of either electrical coax or optical toslink can be treacherous in terms of the degrading jitter incurred making the quality of the S/PDIF interconnect of great importance.

Julf- Yes I agree with you that data only digital transmission can go for long distances without corruption, but digital music in S/PDIF travels with not only the digital data but also the master clock, word clock, and bit clock that are native to S/PDIF which as we all know can be very easily corrupted making the transmission of digital music in S/PDIF even just a few feet over either electrical coax or optical toslink the potential for being a sonically degrading journey.

Julf- We could argue for days about whether your or Audio Asylum co-founder Jon Risch's theories of digital signal transmission are correct, but the fact remains that when I replaced a 6 MHz bandwidth Monster Lightspeed Toslink with the 30 MHz Audioquest Optilink 4 Fused Silica Glass Toslink that there was such an improvement in sound quality that it was like listening to a much better recording of the same Music and that elevated sound quality has continued through each and every application I have used this unique Fused Silica Glass Toslink in over the last 10 years. I am just trying to raise awareness of the improved sound quality that both I and John Atkinson who continues to use the Audioquest Fused Silica Glass Toslink as his preferred reference S/PDIF cable in his digital equipment reviews for Stereophile Magazine have achieved through the use of this unique Fused Silica Glass Toslink cable which is the same Fused Silica Glass conductor that Audioquest also uses in their ATT/ST Glass cables and has 6X more bandwidth than the common 6 MHz bandwith Toslink cable that most people are familiar with the horrible sound of.

esldude- I agree with you about bandwidth alone not being the secret to good performance in a digital cable! That Synergistic Research digital coax I had had a 1 Mhz bandwidth and because if it the cable sounded so highly detailed that it sounded spitty! I have a huge appreciation for detail, but hearing the singer's mouth open just before they sang was just too much detail. Thank you very much for your comment about the electrical isolation that Toslink offers as being a benefit. Please don't get me wrong. I am not trying to prove that Fused Silica Glass Toslink is better than digital electrical coax I'm just sating that in the 3 digital front ends I have used in my audio system the Fused Silica Glass Toslink has out performed all of my other Toslink and digital coax cables. Again, I'm not challenging the performance capabilities of digital coax but rather telling you about an amazingly obscure alternative that has proven to be a highly effective alternative in my audio system over the last decade that a few members might possibly be interested in.

sandyk- I have known perfectly well about the additional conversion from electrical to IR Optical all along and I am in no way inferring that it does not induce some amount of degradation, but rather that there must be more areas of concern that are being overlooked because over the last 10 years as the 30 MHz Bandwidth Audioquest Optilink 4 Fused Silica Glass Toslink has time after time proven that it sounds much better than any other digital cable that it has been compared with whether they be digital electrical coax or lower bandwidth Toslink cables. I have even A/B tested it with both the Dayton GOC 65 strand Filament Glass Toslink and the 12 MHz bandwidth 280 strand SonicWave Glass Toslink and in each case the low bandwidth Glass Toslink cables make a very poor showing against the 30 MHz Bandwidth Glass Toslink. I do not want to cause any contention here its just that I've been thoroughly enjoying this 30MHz Glass Toslink cable for 10 years now and it is so radically different than the common place 6 MHz plastic fiber filament Toslinks which I heartily agree with you literally choke the life out of the music. I did not share this with you to 'one-up' digital coax, but rather to let you know that the 30 MHz Bandwidth Audioquest Optilink 4 Fused Silica Glass Toslink exists because there some folks with digital front ends that perform on a much higher level than mine does and I think that this Glass Toslink cable could lift the sound quality of their audio system to a spectacular new level. It is rare that I see this high quality high bandwidth Fused Silica Glass Toslink in use. About the only name you might recognize who knows its advanced level of capability and uses it is John Atkison at Stereophile who used his Audioquest Optilink 5 Fused Silica Glass Toslink cable to get a $169 24/96 Musical Fidelity V-Link to improve the sound quality of a Benchmark DAC and they are supposed to be pretty much immune to jitter. I consider the Computer Audiophile site very much up to those high standards of professionalism and expert knowledge of digital audio and so I wanted to let the membership know about the capabilities of this rarely seen 30 MHz Fused Silica Glass Toslink cable which is a rare gem that few in the world of digital audio have knowledge of.

Julf- There must have been a misunderstanding and I wanted to point out that I just wanted to point out that I never said anything about the 'need to transmit a square wave'. What I did say was a quote from Audio Asylum co-founder Jon Risch when he said "Now the digital audio signal is transmitted at about a 3 MHz fundamental rate, with harmonics up to at least ten times that frequency, in order to acheive a nice square wave shape." Please note that Jon specifically said 'nice square wave shape' and nothing about transmitting a square wave. As far as the integral importance of transmitting digital signal harmonics in another case go according to Jon Risch went on the record as saying... "The basic fundamental frequency component is taken to be the base frequency, which is about 2.8 Mhz for 44K/16 bit audio. However, they do attempt to square up the wavefrom as much as possible, less transistion time equals less possibility for jitter, so the harmonics are probably significant up to 10-20 Mhz." The 'nice square wave shape' which Jon Risch was referring to where transmitting the harmonics of the digital music signal are so important to achieving a lower transition time which subsequently lowers the possibility of jitter shows how the transmission of harmonics are very important to the accurate transmission of the digital music signal. The reason I sought out this information in the first place was to try to figure out how the 30 MHz Bandwidth Audioquest Optilink 4 Fused Silica Glass Toslink was able to sound so much better than my $150 XLO Reference 4 digital coax, $350 MIT Digital Reference coax, $500 Synergistic Research Digital Corridor, $200 Illuminations D-60 digital coax and even a $600 Marigo Apparition Mk 2 Reference digital coax that I borrowed from the local audio shop specifically for the purposes of comparison. When I found out from Jon Risch that the bandwidth of the digital interconnect has a profound effect on its ability to transmit a more complete set of harmonics which results in lowering the possibility for jitter of the digital signal it went a long way towards explaining how it was that the 30MHz bandwidth Audioquest Optilink 4 Fused Silica Glass Toslink cable was able to bring a much greater level of micro and macro level detailing and a truer tonal character along with a more startlingly transparent presentation of the music to my audio system than any of the Digital coax cables I have ever owned or auditioned. As I said before the Digital coax cables that I've owned sounded great when I was using them in my digital front end, but compared to the 30MHz bandwidth Audioquest Optilink 4 Fused Silica Glass Toslink cable none of them could achieve the same excellent levels of playback quality.

Kato- Not all optical Toslink cables are the same and neither do they have the same kind of filament. Common plastic fiber filament Toslink has a bandwidth of about 6 MHz and this is what has given Toslink such a bad reputation because it chokes out the harmonics of the 3.3 MHz fundamental which needs bandwidth out to 10X that of the fundamental on order to form a nice square wave. Back in 2002 I bought an 30 MHz Bandwidth Audioquest Optilink 4 Glass Toslink cable which has the same Fused Silica Glass filament that they use in their ATT/ST Glass cables. Over the last 10 years I have compared it to many coax cables up to a price-point of $600 and I have yet to find one that has the absolute transparency that the Audioquest Optilink 4 Fused Silica Glass Toslink has in that it has a 30 MHz bandwidth which is sufficient to allow the full development of the Digital signal's harmonics which is essential for the best sounding digital music playback. Most recently I used my old Musical Fidelity V-Link to compare my .99999 silver Illuminations D-60 coax to the Optilink 4 Fused Silica Glass Toslink and although the Illuminations D-60 sounds absolutely great on its own when compared to the Fused Silica Glass Toslink it immediately becomes apparent that a lot of low level detail is being completely glossed over by the Illuminations D-60 and a portions of the harmonic structure of the Music is not being fully fleshed out. Those who have never used or heard a 30 MHz bandwidth Fused Silica Glass Toslink will continue to assume that Toslink is vastly inferior to coax and will never be bothered with what their Music might sound like using a 30 MHz bandwidth Fused Silica Glass Toslink cable like the one John Atkinson used to allow the V-Link add so much additional fidelity to the Benchmark DAC in his Stereophile Magazine Review of the V-Link... "I then changed to the V-Link, had it feed the Benchmark via a 1m length of AudioQuest Optilink-5 glass TosLink cable, and did not touch the Benchmark's volume control. The violins in the Sibelius were now slightly less steely, the soundstage a tad wider and deeper. More important, the sounds of individual instruments, such as the horns at the start of the first movement, and the timpani and plucked double basses at the start of the second, were slightly more of a piece with the surrounding acoustic."

James1776- I've been using Transparent Ultra RCA terminated analog interconnects with my Conrad-Johnson and Counterpoint Vacuum Tube gear with their Audio Alchemy i2s digital front end for almost 10 years. In my computer music transport I use a 30M Hz bandwidth Audioquest Optilink 4 Glass Toslink which I bought for 1/2 price ($175) back in 2002 and continually using ever since and it has the same Fused Silica Glass conductor that the Audioquest AT&T ST Glass cables have. Over the last 10 years I have been able to compare the Optilink 4 glass toslink to the MIT Reference digital coax, XLO Reference 4, Synergistic Digital Corridor and Illuminations D-60 electrical coaxial cables which I have owned and the Optilink 4 Glass Toslink always been able to render a fuller and much more elegantly transparent harmonic structure in each of the comparisons. I even got to borrow a Marigo Apparition Reference Mk 2 silver conductor digital coax cable from the local audio shop and even this $600 cable was outmatched by the ability of the Optilink 4 glass toslink to transparently preserve the harmonic structure of the music along with a set of very accurate and highly descriptive venue ambiance cues which the digital coax cables I have used to date have not been able to deliver quite as transparently in my audio system although these differences are rendered trivial when compared to when I first compared the Audioquest Optilink 4 glass toslink to the Monster Lightspeed 200 plastic fiber conductor toslink I was using with my digital transport at the time it was like listening to a completely better recording and mastering of the same music with the plastic fiber conductor Toslink sounding muddy by comparison.

I have had my SOtM dX USB HD Asynchronous USB-S/PDIF Converter which features the XMOS XS1-L1 event driven microprocessor for about a month now and even at its most restricted playback levels it sounds better than the Musical Fidelity V-Link I used before only not for the obvious build quality related reasons which I expected. I am using JRMC and the ASIO drivers on my Fidelized HP notebook computer to run the SOtM dX USB-S/PDIF converter and when power from the notebook's 65 watt SMPS is being used the SOtM only sounds slightly better than the V-Link sounds using the HP desktop computer's 460 watt SMPS with the same Music from its JRMC player. The next level of much improved sounding playback quality that the SOtM dX is capable of is reached when the notebook computer is switched over to battery power which ends any possible sonic comparisons to the V-Link while using its SMPS power source as the higher performance potential of the SOtM dX is begins to be tapped while as it uses battery power from the notebook computer. The next level of playback quality that the SOtM dX has access to comes from switching it off of USB power and replacing it with a 50 WH Powerstream 4350D Li-ion Polymer battery to power it directly through its external power option. Using this directly supplied 12 volt 2 amp source of Pure DC power the SOtM dX becomes capable of a level of palpable and absolutely natural sounding playback quality that I have not heard since was I playing MFSL 1/2 speed mastered 180 gram vinyl on my Rega P3 turntable a decade ago. This is the SOtM dX USB-HD and its Li-ion Polymer external power supply during some 24/88.2 music playback... http://i468.photobucket.com/albums/rr44/Maxxwire_Photos/AQ/SOtMDC.jpg ~Maxx~