LAIV Harmony

@sns Belated thanks for taking the time to share your detailed impressions of how the Harmony performs with the Gaia over I2S. Sounds pretty great. Look forward to hearing how you get on with the Tubulus I2S (Concentus I’m guessing?).

I also look forward to trying some even higher quality I2S and USB gear in the near future. I have a Ustars C19 (ext 10Mhz version) en route, a different price category to the Gaia that’s for sure but the French hifi forum loves this thing, will be interesting. Plan is to use it as an HQPlayer NAA. And a pair of optical USB isolators with SFP cages.

Cheers

@kereru Your welcome. I changed my order at last minute from the Concentus to Ximius, Ximius is their new reference I2S cable.

I expect you'll find optical conversion to be worthwhile, I started with the generic converters with the wall warts, over time went with Sonore, upraded the Sonore with quality LPS, DC cables, optical cables and Finisar 1475 transceivers. Even the generic devices with wall warts provided an upgrade at the time, knew potential for better existed.

@sns interesting re the new Ximius, first I’d heard of this.

Re optical fibre I should clarify these are a matched pair of optically isolated USB converters: USB in > SFP socket > SFPs or AOC or DAC cables > SFP socket > USB out. Will use to feed my LHY UIP. Agree re improvements of optical in the normal Ethernet use case, I have an Afterdark pair with Finisar and Cisco AOCs etc.

@kereru Not sure what you mean by optical usb isolators. Optical is an ethernet/network conversion. No provision or need to have usb isolator on first optical converter in line, the receiving optical converter has the usb isolation and output. 

EX: ethernet cable> Sonore OpticaModule>Sonore OpticalRendu via AfterDark optical cable>dac or ddc. Both Sonore powered via LPS and use Finisar 1475 transceivers in SFP sockets/modules.

I agree with @sns.

I actually have a network switch with SFP, so I run:

Network Switch/SFP/Finisar Transceiver > Optical Fiber > Sonore Optical Module Deluxe > Ethernet > Sonore Micro Rendu > USB > LAiV Harmony DAC

Optical isolation is definitely the way to go for network noise elimination.