Why not a run high quality USB cable

^^^^ That should make it easier for people who don't want to run a cable across the floor from computer "front end" to DAC in rack and people with big rooms. Nice price too!

Steve,
Does the repeater "screw up" the timing of the stream so that implementations that depend on "constant" USB rate for clock recovery don't work? If so, async USB may not be affected. The price is so cheap, I may just get one and try it with my QB-9.

larry

Yes, USB 2.0 spec is 15 feet. You may get away with longer with slower devices. Also, you just need a cable that meets spec - $20 or so. The only way a USB can "change the sound" is if somehow bits are uniformly changed to alter the sound in a uniform way. Or some bits get flipped and some samples are corrupt and substituted in the player with previous good samples. It's quite easy to determine if your cable is corrupting data. Just connect an external USB drive to your computer and cable and copy files with some sort of data verification (checksums, zip file intergrity test etc) and see if any files get corrupted compared to the source when reading it back. It's very unlikely you'll see and difference between a $20 cable and a $200 "audiophile" USB cable.

Thanks, Steve, for the reply. For $15 I decided to try the cable referenced above to satisfy my own curiosity. I connected it between my "front end" netbook and Ayre QB-9. I used my 5M USB 2.0 cable for a total of 15M of USB cable. I couldn't hear any differences. Sounded fine to me. Of course I don't have any equipment to take any type of measurements at the DAC input. And, I was only sending CD data, I don't have any higher rez PCM to try.