usb sounds so bad

[roob]

What operating system and what software player are you using?

[hixy]

What operating system and what software player are you using?

windows 7 and media player.

[Batty]

Have you tried a different player ie media monkey?

[James G]

I don't have any experience with the 7520 so I can't speak about that, but I had a cheap Chinese dac whose usb input sounded like a gray fog compared to the spdif. I couldn't understand what all these people were raving about usb.

Then I got my current dac and now the usb and the spdif are almost indistinguishable. Almost I say because the CD player still beats it, but by a much smaller margin than with the other dac.

So in my case it was mostly down to the implementation on the usb input more than anything I was doing wrong.

Currently I'm using Winamp with the WASAPI plug-in under Windows Vista. Give it a try. ASIO4ALL might sound a gnat's fart better, but with WASAPI I can still use the volume slider. I use this for casual listening of FLAC and Shoutcast Radio. Actually I'm listening to it now as I'm typing this.

[John]

Try it on foobar and see what happens. Do you have someone who also has a DAC just in case their is a fault You should be able to get the USB up to CD levels

[roob]

Ok.
As previously mentioned install Foobar 2000, download the Wasapi pluging and drag it into the Foobar components folder.
Rip some cds either in Flac or Wav format using Eac.
Run Foobar and from the Preferences>output menu select Wasapi usb device, play some music.
This should be a major improvement over mp3/Mediaplayer even via usb but still not as good as using a Hiface and a decent coax cable, but give it a try its free so nothing to lose.

[roob]

The quality of a dacs usb interface also has a bearing on the SQ produced, ideally the interface should have its own 5v power supply on board the dac instead of drawing its power from a noisy PC environment.

[hixy]

Thanks folks,ripped cd with Exact Audio and now using foobar sounds very respectable,

[John]

good news

[dave2010]

Thanks folks,ripped cd with Exact Audio and now using foobar sounds very respectable,

Now you seem to have fixed the problem - good! I don't think you ever told us exactly what you were using/doing before. I'm curious to know.

I was going to ask how the USB sounded bad, such as was it choppy, or with a lot of glitches etc. Sometimes other programs or processes running on a machine can disrupt the sound. I'm guessing you may have a slight quality reduction if your USB is only generating 16 bits output - but that's really not too significant unless you're trying to play high resolution files. It could also affect some compressed digital formats which generate outputs at greater than 16 bits, but only slightly. Another possibility was that that's exactly what you were trying to do, and something in the chain wasn't downsampling to match your DAC. That can either give no output at all, or some really bad sounds.