PS Audio Digital Link III - Best Connection to MBP

of the three inputs on the Dlink III I find the coax input with silver stranded digital cable to perform the best. Using digital OFHC copper coax was not that different from the toslink quality with glass optical cable. Realremo is on target about the USB input with PC... don't know if same limitation applies to MAC

the coax for sure

I own and have tried the DL111 with all of the inputs, I would rate them is this order with usb way down.

1 coax
2 toslink

3 usb

Airport Express is fine, providing you reclock it with something like the Synchro-Mesh. Otherwise, crap I'm afraid. The advantage with networked audio like AE is that it avoids many of the nasties of the audio stack in the computer, although Mac WiFi avoids less of this than PC by encoding the data as ALAC (Apple Lossless). There may be some SQ compromise there.

With Sonos or SB Touch etc, you can avoid completely the audio stack in the computer and get perfect sound. Then the only problem is jitter, which is solved by a reclocker.

These reclocker solutions can get very close to perfection in a digital source, however because they involve resampling, other methods will always have a slight edge.

One of these other methods is Async USB. Done right, it is probably 15% better than the best reclocker. The devil is in the details however. In order to actually achieve this level of performance, you must be willing to do all of these things: 1) install a SSD in your Mac 2) do several software tewaks 3) Run a particular version of Amarra that is not bug-free 4) Use a high-quality 1.5m S/PDIF cable (at least $500) or a silver 1.5m HDMI I2S cable. 5) run a 16- foot or less high-quality USB cable across the room

I do both of the above. My casual listening is with Sonos driving a reclocker. My critical Listening is with USB interface, Mac Mini and Amarra.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio