Yeah, when I think of a bridge-type streamer, I don’t think of a box with a volume control.
I think Paul’s vision has been poorly communicated and there is a lot of misunderstanding here about the purpose and functionality of the AirLens.
But to be fair, I think the denizens here are more to “blame” for the misunderstandings.
AFAIK, the AirLens is going to be akin to the PSA Ethernet Card and dCS’s (now discontinued) Network Bridge in terms of its function. Controlling the AirLens will be via some separate mechanism(s); e.g., mobile devices and applications and/or connected companion products.
Hopefully clarifications are coming soon from PS Audio. I think the most info on hardware was in the November 2017 video, “Is there a PS Audio server?”, which was slightly updated in 2021 with info that the half-sized box is coming first, called AirLens not Bridge III. For the UI, there was the March 2018 thread, “We’d like some help with Octave”. At least the long wait saved me money in the meantime. Though recent chip price inflation will probably catch this up.
I hope the recommended I2S cable isn’t more expensive than the Airlens
I guess not few of the later buyers will combine it with a few hundred $ fuse, a low thousand $ power cord and a low thousand $ digital cable…maybe also a few hundred $ vibration killer feet. That’s why I wouldn’t press Paul to design the electronics as budget orientated as possible
I’m doing my thing and carrying on with tweaking my digital stream as if the AirLens doesn’t exist. When/If is shows up, I’ll certainly add it to the mix. In the meantime I am about to test a Signature Rendu.
I personally don’t need the AirLens to have a lot of features. Roon Ready, an Optical In, and USB/I2S/AES out. I suppose we’ll need a way to update it. SD Card or over Ethernet are fine with me.
No, that’s a bit off the mark. For a DAC to do its job well, it has to produce the exactly correct voltage at the exactly correct moment in time, thousands or even millions of times a second. (Around 5.6 million for the DAC we’re discussing!) The voltage part is primarily influenced by power supplies, component precision and electrical noise while the timing is obviously based on a clock and is negatively impacted by jitter, which means irregular timing between the translation of samples to their appropriate voltages.
The DS DAC design is particularly strong in its ability to adjust itself to the long-term average pace of the incoming data stream while also ensuring that each sample is converted to its output voltage with the minimum possible variation in timing from sample to sample. Those abilities are what we refer to by “jitter rejection” and “reclocking”. However, they are adaptive and not-quite-perfect mechanisms: improvements to the regularity of the incoming data stream will result in incremental reductions to jitter at the output too.
That’s why having “reclocking” at the output of the AirLens is not actually redundant.
Yes, actually I didn’t think it does harm if redundant at both sides. I just thought both sides have it in case the other (of a different brand) has not. But I guessed it wouldn’t be necessary on both sides.
It’s not about “necessary”. It’s about how close to perfection you can get the timing in the only place that matters: the actual conversion from numeric abstraction to a representative voltage. Jitter is the measure of your imperfection, and reclocking attempts to reduce the amount of jitter in the signal being fed to the next stage of the process whatever that happens to be. Sometimes a lower-quality reclocker could actually increase the amount of jitter – like if you ran a top-of-the-line CD transport through a commodity PLL receiver. It makes sense for PS Audio to invest in both sending the best quality output they can manage from their transport, regardless of the DAC, as well as eliminating as much jitter as they can inside their own DAC, regardless of the transport. The combination of the two is excellent, according to those who’ve used the PST and DMP etc with their DS DACs.
And, I wish @Paul or someone at PSA would definitively indicate the capability set for this thing. I’ve been sitting here in limbo wondering if I should just get a Denafrips DDC. A first world annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.
Not definitive, I reckon, but in post #40 there’s speculation on what might be offered for specs/outputs, etc… (Or maybe it’s just a wishlist. Interesting, in any event.)
This one caught my eye…
Does anyone have experience with “AES/EBU dual-wire mode”? My Denafrips Pontus II has two AES/EBU inputs, and from what I’ve read, I think one could use them individually, or as a “dual-wire mode” configuration.
Anyone know what “dual-wire mode” might mean? Faster speeds? Higher resolution? Comparison to I2S?
I have experience with dcs Vivaldi. In dual mode, basically you transmit one channel per cable, doubling the sample rate limit of the aes/ebu standard. Therefore, you are able to go to dsd128 using the aes interface, which is normally limited to dsd64.
You can use “single mode”, but then you will be limited to DSD64, as above.
Remember that dcs Vivaldi “streamer” is also an upsampler, so it feeds the dac up to dsd128 if in aes dual mode.
More details here. Reading again, I might be wrong about transmitting one channel per cable. But the overall effect is exactly what I said: doubling the aes capacity.
The setup also doubled the data rate for pcm, from 192 for up to 384.
I the dCS system it was clearly better using the dual AES and running the upsampler to full capacity (dsd128 or pcm384).
In that setup, DSD was more laid back, relaxed and presented a larger soundstage. Pcm had more bite, with more presence and a narrower but more precise soundstage. The dual AES just gave you more ot these qualities, both for DSD and pcm
With USB and the new proprietary optical connections, that are almost obsolete. For me, it is one of the features that drags on dCS. The have to move away from spdif/aes and all of its clocking complexity to more modern true asynchronous interfaces.
They are moving very, very slow.
And keeping the complexity of the setup. And the high costs.
I believe chord has one similar conexion, but using dual BNC (to take full advantage of m-scaler). With that one I don’t have any experience.
As per upsampling, none can do a better job than hqplyaer, in my opinion.
yeah, I use HQP with my RaspPi + Pi2AES (and AES/EBU into Pontus II). Works great. Not sure I need more than that with my current system, or at what point we start hitting the law of diminishing returns.
So it’ll be interesting to hear the AirLens, for sure.
