Want to buy Ayre C-5xeMP but...

If you have a Linn dealer near by, check out an Akurate DS. It's about the same price as the Arye. I have had one for a few months and love it. I have network storage in another room so theres no noise. You can also control it from an Apple itouch or iphone which makes absolutley no noise. You just need a wireless router so the itouch can access the network storage.

The beauty of the Linn DS is there are no extra conversions at all. It takes the data straight off a ethernet cable coming from your storage device. It does not use a USB conection. The DAC is internal. This is technically the best method available. Also they can play up to 24 bit 192 khz files unlike most other solutions.

From what I've read the problem with synchronous usb is it has to reclock the signal from the computer. Asynchronous usb apparently solves this problem. As of now the Wavelength Audio usb dacs and the new Ayre usb dac are the only ones that use asynchronous usb. Also Herman is right that usb 2 does support 24/192 data but there are no dacs that take advantage of that yet. Wavelength is working on it and will probably have it soon.

Any time you use a outboard dac the signal must be converted and reclocked with the exception of the asynchonous usb and dacs that can accept a I2S connection. As for firewire I'm not sure if it needs to reclock or not. Firewire does support 24/192 though. The Linn DS players have the dac inside and take the data straight from a buffer and don't need to reclock the signal. This is similar to a one box CD player. I am not a expert but this is how I understand it from what I have read online.

IMO using your own ears to decide what sounds best to you is more important a factor than any one technology.

Cheers,
Sean

I want to add that spidf, toslink, and synchronous usb conversion create more jitter than the other alternatives.

Relentless did you get to listen to the Ayre dac? I was considering it before I bought the Linn but it was not out yet.

I had a usb converter from Empirical Audio with a benchmark dac1 before the Linn and tried a few different cheap usb cables and did not notice much difference. Steve from Empirical Audio says that you should also try all the different usb ports on your computer because they can sound different. I tried this also and if there was a difference it was very small. These are all small tweaks. The media player you use can make a small difference also.