pgruebele

That's very interesting "Bill" because I have no record of a William or Bill as a customer. I'm also very curious why you would not return the unit if you disliked it so much? It's a lot of money for a desk lamp. People in this forum are looking for real answers from real people so I wonder who prompted you to make such a post... Cheers Philip Gruebele Audiophilleo.com

Larry: I was unaware that Benchmark used CEntrance. That is indeed a good marketing job! Elp: Sorry, no 1.5 in the works.... Cheers Philip

But only the newer DACs have USB input and unfortunately for the most part I think the general consensus is that their USB input sounds worse than their SPDIF inputs... Cheers Philip

Hi Pat 1. It's still not clear to me from your response: Do you measure your jitter at the actual BNC output? 2. We specify exacly what equipment and test methodology was used to obtain our phase noise plots and integrated phase jitter values here: http://audiophilleo.com/definitions.aspx?jitter Cheers Philip

By all means Kamil. The only way to tell if it will audibly improve your setup is to try it! Cheers Philip

Kamil, If you don't need any of the features of the audiophilleo1, then I would recommend the audiophilleo2 since it is less expensive and there is no reason to pay for features you don't need. Whether or not the VirtualCable feature would make a difference is difficult to say though. Cheers Philip

Thanks Elp for pointing this thread out to me and thanks everyone else for the feedback. I will make every effort to keep the comparison chart up to date and accurate. Unfortunately most manufacturers don't provide published jitter specs, so what little there is came from reviewers or my own measurements. I did get some feedback from users and manufactureres and have made corrections. Due to popular request I also recently tested and added the M2TECH hiFace. Pat, questions to you: 1. Specifically how did you measure your SPDIF output with the WaveCrest (since SPDIF will produce various clock periods you must do some filtering)? Is the 4ps measurement for the SPDIF output of the device or the clock inside the device? 2. Do you think that the WaveCrest results (RMS period jitter) paint a complete picture of the jitter? Regarding jitter in general: Although RMS period jitter is very useful information, it is really integrated phase jitter (or phase noise plots) which gives a more complete view of the jitter that might affect audio quality. This is why we augmented our originally published WaveCrest results with integrated phase jitter specs from 1Hz to 100Khz as published here http://audiophilleo.com/definitions.aspx?jitter The noise floor for our WaveCrest is around 5ps so it is not possible for us to take measurements below that. We have actually obtained values that low in some of our tests. However we spec worst case results for all sample rates (44-192) clocks. Also note that we actually measure the SPDIF output, not the internal clock. Internal clock measurements would show much lower jitter values, but only the SPDIF output is of interest to the user since that is what is fed to the DAC. Cheers Philip Gruebele Audiophilleo.com

The fundamental problem all of us have to deal with here is bit transparency. How do you know that your audio stream is not being modified before being sent to the DAC? You already purchased the Stello U2, so for you this is a moot point, but for anyone else who is concerned about this problem, there are 2 SPDIF transports out there that can test for bit transparency: 1. The USB based audiophilleo1 2. The firewire based INT202 Regards