I doubt it’s been described much so I’ll try my best. The Air Gap Audio Interface is something we invented so you won’t find much about it online. It will first show its face in the upcoming server.
The AGAI is a digital audio interface that connects two subsystems together through the air. It’s one step removed from a fiber optic cable where the audio data is transmitted via light through a fiber cable. The idea is isolation.
As I have mentioned before the problem with digital audio systems is contamination. You have a noisy computer inside a server and as it chugs away at its tasks it jitters and pollutes the output signal feeding the DAC. This is why, we believe,
FLAC sounds differently than WAV even though the bits are identical. A FLAC file requires far more bit crunching to extract the bits than does a WAV file. Those crunched bits contaminate the final output signal.
Imagine now that the noisy computer inside the server were not in the server and was a mile away. Its noise would not be a problem as long as we took its output and regenerated it in a Digital Lens. Since a mile long chassis might not sell too
well, the next best thing is to physically isolate the two systems within a single chassis. To do that we need separate power supplies, physical boards, and at the end of the proverbial day, a completely isolated connection between the computer and the output
Digital Lens. That’s where the AGAI comes into play. By bridging the physical gap between the internal noisy computer in the server by light traveling through air, we get excellent isolation.
In the upcoming Ted Smith Signature DAC he’s taken the problem of isolation one step further than we have in the server. In the TSS the noisy digital processing happens inside its own chassis and the quiet, clean analog happens in its own chassis.
The two are connected again through light, but because the physical distance between chassis and air gap is measured in inches rather than the required fractions of inches, we use a fiber optic cable between the two.
Of course, one of the limitations of fiber optics is bandwidth—getting high speed data through TOSLINK doesn’t work but that isn’t a limitation of light or fiber optics, just TOSLINK. Some of the highest speed data in the world travels on beams
of light.
Whichever method is used, AGAI or high-speed fiber, light transmission of digital data offers the possibility of getting noise and jitter out of the signal and gets us that much closer to perfection.