This isn’t life or death…but I can’t find this video and I’m trying to settle a bet.
There was a youtube video awhile back that Paul did for PS Audio in which he was describing a story where he was out at CES or some high end audio convention and he forgot his USB cable. He then calls his friend at audioquest(I think it was audioquest) which then quickly sends him/hand delivers him a usb cable.
Does anyone remember which video this was or at least which cable it was? Was it the diamond usb cable?
It was a video I did from Axpona last year but don’t remember what cable it was. It was great! Saved our bacon. I’ve asked Isaac from Audioquest to chime in so hopefully he’ll do that sometime this weekend.
Thanks for helping me to recall a fun moment from AXPONA! I travel with a few AudioQuest products I purchased prior to joining the team a few years ago and one of them is my Diamond USB cable. It helps me to listen to various components with some consistency. In this case, it allowed me to assist some dear friends make music.
Thank you for your support! I think you’ll be pleased and I look forward to hearing your feedback.
I frequently use Jitterbugs with my various usb devices; my Mac Mini, which serves as my music server, has two Jitterbugs installed, in parallel, next to each other on the connections panel.
I do recommend it with DragonFly’s Red and Black, however I don’t recommend Jitterbug with DragonFly Cobalt.
Hope this helps and feel free to reach out with any other questions.
I took the plastic shell off one and left the shell on the other…then you actually can install them in parallel on the mac mini…at least on my ‘MGEN2LL/A’.
My ‘MGEN2LL/A’ mac mini has 4 usb ports so, if you’re looking at the back of the mac I use the left most usb port for my jitterbug(with plastic shell) and usb cable to dac and then use the port to the right of it to install my empty jitterbug(without plastic shell).
You will notice how tight it is though…which requires you to de-shell one jitterbug:
and what is the thinking behind an empty one? What is it “dejittering”?
Also, regarding removing the shell… seems like there’d be plenty of room between the outermost ports to not need to remove the shell of the jitterbug. (At least from the photos of it I’ve seen it just looks like a flash drive.)
The picture is actually somewhat deceiving, the jitterbug is actually quite chunky:
Regarding having an empty one I can’t really give you a good reason…that is a good question that maybe Issac can better explain. I will say it does seem to sound better with my audioquest carbon. All the reviewers also seemed to use two and audioquest shows how two can be more beneficial:
Ok, DO NOT plug your diamond usb cable into a jitterbug.
I just got my Diamond USB cable and plugged it into my mac with the same setup I had with my carbon usb cable and I thought something was broken…the bottom-end sounded like it was under water.
I took out both jitterbugs and HOLY CRAP! First it almost seemed louder…I actually turned the volume down on my DSD Sr. Sounds amazing now.
Anyway, I love the diamond usb cable. It sounds far better than the carbon and carbon + jitterbug(the carbon + jitterbug sounded really good imo)…but diamond with no jitterbug sounds the best imo.
I use the Mac Mini pictured in Mr Ryan’s photo, for reference.
Awesome news with Diamond! The noise-rejecting properties of Diamond are many orders of magnitude greater than in Jitterbug plus Carbon. If you use a music server you might want to play with upsampling settings again and listen to “see” which you prefer.
“Parallel” in this case means utilizing separate USB inputs while in “series” means plugging one Jitterbug into the other. The Jitterbugs in parallel just need to be on the same USB board not necessarily touching each other on adjacent inputs; when I say “next to each other” on my Mac Mini, I actually skip one of the USB inputs. I don’t “de-shell” the units.
When it comes to Jitterbug, as with many proposed tweaks in a system, your milage will vary and absolute statements about efficacy can’t be made. For instance, Jitterbug sounds good with DF Black and Red, but not DF Cobalt. In my system I use Jitterbug with my Diamond USB out of my Mac Mini into a Direct Stream DAC and the improvement is obvious. Whether you get the same results depends on lots of factors that are best addressed system by system. The good news is that AudioQuest offer generous return policies through its dealer network so can try for yourself and return it/them if it doesn’t work our for your system.
Finally a note about Jitterbug; it is not a jitter-reducing device although it’s name sort of implies that it is. Jitterbug is a USB noise reducer. It acts something like, but isn’t per se, a power-conditioner for your USB board and it helps to filter out the high-frequency noise generated by those USB devices that have nothing to do with audio or the information being processing by the host device, itself.
