Which USB reclocker is as good as the Innuos Phoenix USB?

@vinylfan62 

+1, especially when combined with an Etherregen upstream

@lalitk 

In my experience there are many ways to attain Nirvana. And sometimes little bits help…

I have the reclocked, LPS fed Etherregen directly feeding my Innuos Zenith mk3. When I added the LHY Audio switch upstream of the Etherregen, there was a further significant improvement in dimensionality and impulse response. If you daisy chain 2 Etherregensnyou may get similar benefits. Pls note that you can’t though feed both with the same LPS since you’d effectively be breaking the moat.

@nyev,

you are spot-on. It does though irk that innuOS makes you buy two power supplies and 2 clocks for more or less the same purpose, doesn‘t it? And adding the $6-7k to the DAC budget might have significant benefits as well…

The assumption that more money leads to better sound is often faulty. @mahgister has often made that point beautifully. And digital isn’t analogue where simplicity wins anytime because of transmission losses.

With the obvious deficiencies of USB as an audio connection one cannot but wonder why better connections have largely been ignored by server engineers. Might that relate to the ability of asynchronous USB to slave the server‘s clock to the dac?  Hard to explain given otherwise clearly superior characteristics of I2S, AES/EBU and BNC. Not  even to mention fibre…

@lalitk

Substantially in agreement with you. Ideally you‘d have an integrated Server/Dac with an integrated analogue attenuator and a very high quality clock. Given the output voltage of normal dacs, I don‘t believe there is a point for a pre unless the power amp has unusually high input impedance. The point about the clock is very material: I have had very major benefit from using a LHY Audio Ocxo switch AND a 10m controlled Etherregen to clean up the Ethernet signal into the server as well as  reclocking the actual DAC conversion.

My comment on the vagaries of USB relates both to noise from the contained 5V DC line and to ground level and RFI/EMI incursions. Many dacs to this day don‘t have galvanically isolated USB inputs (I use Intona Isolator and cables) and using dual USB cables with a separate 5v LPS again has yielded major benefita

Musician Phoenix? Must be a Chinese Gaia knockoff… This thread was supposedly about the InnuOS version