With a potential update to Windom that will do quad DSD thru I2S and USB will there be an updated bridge that can handle quad DSD also?
I would suspect not unless Conversdigital (current Bridge supplier) releases another plug-in module like the Bridge with higher specs.
I guess if there is a potential streamer in the works it would be irrelevant.
I think that Octave will be on a plug in board, if I’m not mistaken. I think it will be in house and to a third party supplier. My fuzzy old brain, if this is wrong.
This has been discussed many times over the past three or more years. Yes, PS Audio is hoping for a replacement for the Bridge II. It will be designed in house so no need to coordinate with Convers Digital whenever an update is needed. The replacement will run Octave software, but it is TBD if it will be a slide in card (same as Bridge II) or a separate box. Most assuredly, the replacement will handle higher rate DSD, exactly which rate (128, 256, 512) is TBD. When will this be available? Paul has said in the past it will be (at least) six months behind the Octave Server. When is Octave Server going to be available? That’s been a moving target, but this fall seems a safe guess.
Thanks, Pmotz. Yes this is accurate. We’re now looking at fall for beta testing Octave server. Once that’s released for sale it will be another 6 months or so until we launch Stellar version of Octave streamer and another 6 months before anything resembling Bridge III arrives. Sorry for the slow, slow progress. But there is progress for sure.
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So the Octave owners get to pay $20k and sort out the bugs for the Stellar users 6 months later! As Daniel Day-Lewis said, “there will be bugs”. My experience of streamers is:
- Years 1 and 2 - bugs that may annoy you on a daily basis.
- Years 3 and 4 - bugs about things you probably didn’t notice
- Years 5 and 6 - bugs about things that you don’t understand and are probably programmers simply trying to justify their existence.
- Years 7 onwards - no matter, you’ll have bought a different streamer by then.
Prove me wrong!
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So you do not want to be part of the Beta?
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The 20k beta, the stellar beta, or bridge III?
Upgrading my oppo with I2S card soon. That might be my solution for DSD streaming.
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Indeed, applies to software / firmware in general I would say!
NO. Did that once already with Devialet, although that went from unstable without Roon to perfect with Roon in one giant and unique leap previously unknown in software history. 19 February 2019 will go down in the record books …
Is that the voice of experience ?!
The one I remember is the MSpeaker X4 that was shown at Munich in 2015 or 2016 and it took a further 3 years to get the software in a condition that the product could be launched. And that was from a company that already had some excellent and sophisticated products.
Not from an audio perspective (well, synths and samplers in the '90s maybe, and I expect it is still the same in that market), but many software and firmware driven devices too, in many industries, seem to have to hit a release date whether all the promised features are ready or not, so there is always the “this feature will be enabled in a future update” caveat in such things. It just seems to be accepted by most which is one of the reasons I like stuff that is driven by hardware, hardwired logic etc. as much as possible.
An exception appears to be Ted’s DACs - there he keeps the feature set approximately the same and just incrementally improves things like noise floor, filtering etc. That I can applaud, as they didn’t need to as (per my understanding) improve stuff as everything worked as advertised on the DS DACs from day 1 
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I think you are confusing Octave with the TSS. I don’t recall any recent estimates for the price of Octave, but my recollection from months ago is $6k. PS Audio prices based on the cost of parts with a multiplication factor (5x?), so the actual cost depends on what parts go into it. Streamer parts shouldn’t justify $20k list price best I can figure. Presumably it will use the same case as the DS/DMP/P12, so that is a cost “savings”. The TSS is estimated around $20k, but that is Ted’s all out attempt at a DAC, the uber DS so to speak.
Well I hope it’s more like $6,000 because the DCS Bridge is under $5,000 and is hard (if not impossible) to beat and can be fed by a relatively cheap external usb drive or network storage.
That said, the I2S people can’t use the dCS Bridge as it doesn’t have a usb output (sub-optimal) or I2S output (why would it?). The preferred connection is AES/EBU.
Except when the DSD DAC first came out it measured pretty poorly and it was reported in some tests that it could not resolve more than 16/44. I joined this forum to ask Ted why this was, as I considering upgrading from a mk2 DAC. I hope things have improved since 2014.
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From my experience I agree with you 100%
Agree (again) absolutely!
My take that led to purchase was that a dCS Network Bridge + a sufficiently powerful NAS (to run MinimServer with transcoding etc) was more cost effective and gave at least as good sound quality (when combined with the PS DSD DAC) as any server I was aware of. So I stopped waiting for the potential excellence of Octave to arrive.
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dCS seem to be many years ahead of anyone else and pioneered most aspects of HD PCM and DSD audio. The dCS Bridge even has Dual AES/EBU, something they invented 25 years ago and may become useful with 384khz files! So putting a streamer together was probably one of the least complicated things they’ve ever done and I fell off my chair when I first saw it. Normally dCS stuff is about 10 times what I might pay, but the Bridge was only twice the price of the Auralic Aries I had at the time.