How are most audiophiles going from streamers to DACS

Of course, the general answer is "it depends on the implementation of each". But a few rules of thumb are useful and I am very familiar with the denefrips.

1. Toslink is always inferior. I wont get into detail on why, but both jitter and sampling rate are worse. Pretty cut and dry. Its great when EMI immunity is required.

2. While there are different profiles, and i’m peaking very loosely, in general SPDIF depends on the clock of the sending unit and USB is asynchronous, mostly, so timing is by the clock of the terminating unit (DAC). Since the denefrips DAC’s timing ( and most of it) is vastly superior to the Node, you want the Denefrips in total control. This means USB. Any quality cable will work fine.


Important note: But you still have some ground noise issues with this direct connection, so.....

The best is to run the streamer via ethernet to a fairly quiet (electrically and mechanically) bridge that terminates the ethernet (isolation) and spits out the USB High res profile 2 data. Make sure this unit has a quiet, linear power supply. The denefrips has, again, an isolated USB interface, which helps and will re-clock and read out everything. This is how i run:

1. ROON ROCK streamer
2. Custom modified Raspberry Pi runnign Roon Bridge, with a cusotm made low noise linear power supply
3. USB cable to Denefrips (apple if you care, i dont)

Voila. Superb.

G

to KGBspy:

Actually the optical/toslink issue, unlike many sonic preference sin audio, is not a matter of opinion. It does not support high res; and the optical/electrical component plus the pulse spreading generates lots of potential jitter.  It is designed specifically for high electrical interference environments, and, according to lore, because Toshiba needed a differentiator.

Its great if you have lots of EMI floating around (TV sets for example).  It is definitively the wort otherwise For most it will sound fine I use it from my TV and love the results for involved movies of the symphony.

and

Actually the optical/toslink issue, unlike many sonic preference sin audio, is not a matter of opinion. It does not support high res

all inputs on the DAC support 24/192. I don't know if the Node outputs 192 but that is not a Toslink limitation.

Not in the original standard and rarely supported. And part of the reason is the pulse spreading in the plastic optics.  Its also a very old standard and since it is almost exclusively used by TV manufacturers, the focus has not been on improving it for high end.

As to USB, the real issue here is not "what magic cable should i thrown money at?" but "how do i get good sound?"  Which really begs a different solution.