Will do, just need to grab an alternative (and an actually good USB cable) first lol
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Yep. Completely eliminated any noise from my PC on my desktop setup. Works very well, even with a tube amp, zero noise. Highly recommend. Of course there’s more expensive options out there but for my desktop needs it was a solid pickup.
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So far, I think the digital upgrade I’ve been most impressed with has been a JCAT USB XE EVO, it was so immediately clear of an upgrade to my setup that I didn’t really believe it at first lol. While I don’t have a streamer here to test right now, this card + a well optimized pc and good power supply may honestly be at the same level of some very very good dedicated streamers. This is one of those upgrades so far that feels like there’s actually no downside that I can detect, aside from it being picky about the power supply you use and system optimization, genuinely one of those “everything is just better” upgrades that you rarely get.
I want to say more about it, but genuinely it’s one of those things where if you’re building a dedicated streamer, or tied to your general use pc, this is a no brainier if you have a good dac and want to improve your source. I do think just adding the card itself even with a cheaper psu like an ifi does way more than it has any right to do, but I think it’s performance is only really fully unlocked with a quality PSU. Initially I had tried it with a JCAT optimo, and while that was a big jump over the ifi, I felt that for the price, it kinda was a bit homogeneous in overall sound and presentation. It was great for being pretty hefty and deep sounding, but it just didn’t really feel like anything popped, a slight calming and generic sound almost lol, and I think my setup would be better with something a bit more exciting. I was going to go with a mojo psu, but actually ended up with a uptone JS-4, and while maybe not as well weighted and slam focused it offered better variance and air and space and made this card really mesh well with my setup, and aside from slam and macrodynamics, I would say this is otherwise an improvement in space scale and accuracy, tangibility, and more flexibility/adaptiveness to what’s being played. It’s also just a flat out better value, hard to really complain about considering price vs optimo.
Afterwards, I did end up adding in the master clock for the card, and I think that brought in a further improvement in overall quality just like adding the card itself, but to a lesser degree. I personally think moving to a quality psu was a bigger jump than adding the clock, but the clock feels like the final finishing touch to it that really sold me on what this could do if you already have a good matching psu. And all of this was with generic or cheaper USB cable, excited to see how much further a nicer cable can take this (or eventually a more custom dedicated streamer pc).
As for comparisons, it’s really hard to do any meaningful ones, but, I did previously use the mojo with a 3r master time blackstar for awhile, and I have to say that from rough memory that this card + a good psu is something I’d personally rather have lol. I don’t think it’s at the level of something like an absolute time, but at the same time, this is way cheaper than that. I had previously tried an older jcat femto, and this is a much larger step over that, the evo is easily worth the extra, same with the entry level pink faun card. I haven’t heard the taiko or pink faun ultra cards, but I also didn’t feel that spending that would be worthwhile for this setup so I can’t really comment. This is just way better value than I was expecting it to be lol, I think out of all the digital messing around I’ve been doing, this has been the most immediate and long term satisfying change yet.
I did end up adding a gustard u26 in front of it, and while I think that brought further potential improvement, it had some tradeoffs and was more subtle of a change in comparison to card vs no card, and if I had to choose I’d much rather have the jcat over the gustard, but gustard + jcat has been the most satisfying so far, as I think it really bolsters it a lot.
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I had a similar experience with the older JCAT USB XE card (not EVO), powered by a Mojo LPS and connected to a Mutec MC3+ USB ddc. I know I threw a lot of money at this so that I could have the flexibility of using my PC instead of a streamer, but it worked really well, because the majority of my music is local files.
I do have an Eversolo T8 strreamer now, which I use for streaming albums, but if I want to hop from one album to another, it’s often more convenient to use my PC, and I don’t feel that I’m losing anything.
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I think once I add a master clock (thinking at least a mutec ref10), I’ll be in the point where I have 0 desire to get a streamer again to be honest, I don’t think I’ll end up getting another dac that will justify going beyond what I’ve got.
For me aside from convenience of using a pc and listening to music in the same place, I’m using it for recording and realtime audio editing, and it ends up elevating that along with making it possible since there’s no way I can really do that with a traditional streamer, so trying to optimize the hell out of a general pc felt like the only path I can take lol
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this has always been the most compelling reason. especially if you’re primarily a HP listener or are in a limited space.
This is where you can get the value add and it was probably the wisest way forward.
And given your DAC you’re probably at a good price/performance level.
That said, I still think that there is a point where a streamer makes much more sense and a streamer paired with a GOOD DDC and power will likely net a greater benefit. More so if you’re a an nth level of DAC.
Considering the cost of the JCAT card, a good power supply and a good clock you’re at a level where there’s some damned good off the shelf streamers. The question then becomes, a cost vs. convenience more so than a cost vs. performance.
I think your findings here would not be as close as they are if you hadn’t taken a much more serious approach at solid power foundation from the get go as you have this go around.
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Yeah it just felt like the only way that gave me best bang for buck in this case
Yeah I think anything beyond will be overkill and not worth the money for my setup. Max I will ever end up at is a triunity, and I feel like I can scale this further later on while still staying on the PC at that point
I keep getting rewarded with the mojo so I don’t plan on changing anytime soon lol
I would say so far with the money put into this, that I’d rather have this than most streamers around the same or a bit higher price to be honest. I do think that the ultimate level of performance is something built entirely ground up for streaming, but there’s also way more you can squeeze out of a normal PC with careful part selection and heavy optimization where possible, it just takes a whole lot of time and effort. Some of which that may instead just be worth the cost of admission with a streamer instead of having to fight with things. Streamers help preserve sanity, most of the time
If I hadn’t spent so long optimizing this pc from the ground up and same with power, I absolutely agree. It just shows how much you can get out of things but also how much time youll waste in the process experimenting lol
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A somewhat stupid post, but as I continue to mess with every aspect of my playback chain, I’m once again reminded of how fickle things can be with digital audio lol. I was messing around with some ways to optimize my audio path on my PC to be as bit perfect as possible, and I was testing direct playback methods and software to try and be as close to truly unaltered sound as I could, but turns out that’s not always the best sounding (and I’m not talking about running through any upsampling or other dsp lol).
I will spare both the technical research and the random experimenting, but especially if you have a sigma delta dac or something oversampling, consider NOT going entirely bit perfect and reduce your digital level with software volume in your player of choice by -2-3 db to add headroom. From testing the few random dacs I have laying around, it was a noticeable improvement with some music. This sonic improvement was more beneficial than running purely bit perfect.
This is one of those back to basics thing to me, since I almost always avoid software volume in critical listening, but that was always just because “well any alteration reduces the overall resulting quality,” and that’s still true. But the main reason it’s worth doing this is because most music will push extremely close or even reach digital clipping levels, and when it clips in your music player for only a few samples or pushes right up to the top, when that gets fed into an oversampling dac, that typically will end up being exaggerated and over in the form of minute harshness, collapsed stage, lower resolution, and just sounding artificial overall. If you’re up-sampling you’ll absolutely want to lower as well because that will only exaggerate the issue. The goal is to reduce any overshooting on analog and digital filtering and running out of headroom, and pushing closer to that will reduce filter performance. Even if it’s not clipping going into the dac, if it’s close to doing that, in the actual conversion process it may push it over the edge with most dacs into undesirable territory. This is more detrimental than taking your player digital volume down by a few db (assuming it’s good digital volume)
This was less pronounced from my experience with NOS dacs, and while it can still be a factor as there’s still filtering of the dacs output in the analog domain, it’s more graceful in handling it, and a lower chance of getting some of that nastiness. You will really want to experiment with your dac, and your playback software as not everything is made equal. I do think that with quality music playback software/engine volume control, for a lot of dacs adding -3db of headroom may have the potential to improve the overall experience more than running bit perfect with no software volume, but again all depends as if you’re using a crappy player volume engine or OS volume just running through that could degrade more than the headroom problem. If you only listen to the most pristine recordings that never get digitally hot, this isn’t worth doing, but for most music regardless of genre you might find things get hotter than they should even if it’s technically fine before it enters the dac itself. It was more noticeable with cheaper dacs where their filters and digital design sux lol
This is kinda like a “no shit” sorta thought typing it out, but sometimes in your obsession for trying to get the most bit perfect playback you can, you just realize that’s not always the best sounding choice lol. I got overshadowed on the thought of closest to direct stream, and didn’t think about how that can impact what goes on inside the dac and how that can exaggerate issues fundamental to dac design in the process and how digital volume can be a good compromise even if I already have a strong/high quality analog volume control. I feel like as I continue to rebuild my setup, I am continually getting humbled and force to relearn the things I thought I knew and breezed past before lol
Side note, JRiver clip protection is very good by default and feels like the best compromise in my setup while keeping digital volume (to the user) maxed. Some players also have the ability to add strict dedicated headroom as a setting, I’d rather do it there if you can. Do not do it at the OS or driver level. I should really try to properly understand oversampling/upsampling/filtering again, even if I don’t have any plans to utilize it with the hardware I prefer
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I started doing that in Roon as I use it to convert to DSD in my HP chain because the Wolfson WM8741 DAC chip is native DSD and would upsample PCM into DSD. Figured it was best to move the processing upstream away from the DAC and just send DSD. It did improve it, so not bit perfect as you say and actually reduce the volume digitally as part of the process to -2.5 dB because the additional headroom is a recommended best practice by Roon when upsampling.
I don’t do any upsampling on my 2CH system but I’ll try it out there and see what hear!
I’ve been doing more reading than listening of late, but an experiment like this is a good excuse. :)
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Yeah it’s just something I never really thought about in terms of internally within a dac fundamentally how filtering works for oversampling in both the digital domain and analog output stage, wouldn’t really have thought it to be a big deal when you’re not upsampling or messing with the signal, but it still does matter.
I would’ve initially attributed the improvement in quality mistakenly to just not driving the analog outputs on the dac as hot and having a more preferential level going into the amp, but that wasn’t it.
I’ve been experimenting with things like wtfplay and hysolid and audiolinux and such to further optimize my desktop and bake more improvements into my kernel and underlying audio subsystem, and kept running into the fact that I just liked the sound of jriver more over time, even if there were some moments where the others truly shined and offered a bit closer to high end streamer performance. Lo and behold disabling any clip protection in jriver suddenly equalized the overall playing field for my setup. I feel like my current pc is just becoming more and more a media server with extra steps lol. I have plans for my own dedicated buildout for something truly on the level of high end servers but that’ll be at a later date when I get the rest of my setup sorted
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I did try this on my auralic with its built in software but didn’t like the result… but that was way past -3db. I’ll try to reduce it just a bit and see if that works better. Thanks for the reminder!
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Yeah I’d give it a shot with either 2 or 3db and that’s it, that’s all you really need in most cases from my experience. It really depends on your setup in terms of if it’s worth it or not, not going to be needed in some but may help in others
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