rsowen

By this argument all digital is analogue. The USB physical layer (or "phy" if you like) converts this differential pair to binary before anything else happens - bit stuffing, decoding, Packet ID and CRC checking etc. If something is going wrong at this point then the cable or phy is broken. We test all our designs with sub $1 cables, we never see any bit errors (unless we're doing something horrible like debugging using an intrusive scope or analyser, but even then it is surprising what you can get away with). We run our bit-perfect tests for days... Any perceived differences are not due to signalling in an Async USB DAC...

Hmm not sure I agree with that, I normally term DoP and Native DSD as two separate items. Native DSD being support for ASIO support for DSD, whereas DoP doesn't require anything other than a "normal" ASIO driver (with the headers hacked onto a PCM stream by a player or plugin) To the DAC implementer "native DSD" is nicer, reconfiguring a DAC for DSD at stream-time is just nasty.

Interesting. Keeps it asynchronous I suppose at the cost of some setup, an option to run all in sync mode might be nice. I think this has inspired me to create my own single board multi-channel DSD demo...