Please Help!! looking to get into computer audio.

dtc

Upsampling is no panacea. Its much better to get an outboard asynch USB converter than to rely on upsampling. 

PCs are not real time systems.  synchronous usb is very high in jitter which can be made a little better by Asynch. Sample Rate Conversion, and heavy buffering.  The reviews for the BDA1 and how much better it sounds with the Bryston Player make me worry this is the case.

Asynch Usb however can resolve these issues.

Yes Im aware of the difference between a 103 and 105.  I was just offering options.

Best

Erik

@sun-warrior "So isolation has nothing to do with choosing computer or NAS as server."  

I see your point, but for the benefit of others, let's clarify that if your attach either 1) a computer and any attached hard drives or 2) a NAS to a router(usually in a different room on a different electrical circuit!) thus isolating the device from the DAC you've still got to get the signal to the DAC by ethernet, wifi or a power line adapter solution.
For my money, that's where the microRendu does a superior job vs. anything me and many others have heard.

For those who prefer to keep the PC or Mac located in the listening room, receive the music from on that computer and connect directly to the dac, they are in some ways fighting an uphill struggle regardless of which cable type or USB/SPDIF adapter they use.  Cheers,
Spencer

eric - I fully understand async USB and jitter. However, if the DAC resamples using its own clock, then async vs. sync timing should not be an issue. The DAC controls the final timing, and it is independent of the usb timing. If some people think that DAC sounds better with S/PDIF than USB that is fine. But the issue is probably not jitter in the USB signal, since the DAC reclocks the signal anyway.

My point was simply that the OP should try the USB from his laptop to his DAC before investing in lots of other options.

Um, no you dont, but im not intersted in the argument. 

erik - This is probably not the place for this discussion, but here goes anyway. You have  to understand that the DAC completely reclocks the signal using its own internal clock. The DAC receives the data from its usb input, puts the data into an internal buffer and then pulls the information from its internal buffer and, using its internal clock, reclocks the signal. That was done by Brystron to avoid jitter problems on the USB.

Please explain how the sync timing on the USB effects the internal reclocking of the signal. The only way it can is if the sync usb cannot fill the buffer fast enough, which is very unlikely.

The reclocking process is not done by all DACs. Many just use the timing that comes through the USB, in which case async is certainly preferable to sync USB. But, since the Bryston DAC uses its internal clock to reclock the signal, the jitter on the usb does not make its way into the final data.

You might want to read the Stereophile review, in which they clearly state that the BDA-1 reclocks the signal internally, in order to control jitter.

http://www.stereophile.com/digitalprocessors/bryston_bda-1_da_converter/

From the review

" One of Bryston's primary goals for the BDA-1 was to reduce clock jitter, ie, mistimings of the digital datastream presented to the DAC. Unlike the company's BCD-1 CD player, a one-box transport and DAC, the standalone BDA-1 must reclock all signals fed to its data inputs"


As an aside, I used to make my living doing realtime programming on realtime operating systems. The issue of timing incoming signals coming into a computer is well known to me.