TSS Two Chassis Super DAC

I would like a final fix for the transport already designed and in service first…before it turns into a :sauropod:

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:sauropod: turns into :fuelpump: We could be sitting on a gold mine in a few million years!

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Review mention of DS against Denafrips Terminator.
https://youtu.be/9tGmD6j8fC0
I heard the Terminator at axpona and felt it was neck and neck with my DS Sr.
Ted: we’d all like the next mountain top firmware for DS retake the crown at this price level!

  1. Ribbon Cable: Would ferrites (flat-wide type) on the ribbon cable help with the EMI transfer to/from the digital and analog boards? I’m still riding a high buzz from the benefit ferrites have made on the power cable and RCA interconnects and would be willing to try this out.
  2. 12V PSU Upgrade. Given the number of DS DACs in the market, there must be a market to have PS Audio or a 3rd party offer a upgrade PSU or parts kit + instructions. Would you sanction (or encourage) this?

Thanks
Dan

Ferrites slow the edges of quick transitions: e.g. they add jitter. The signals going over the ribbon cable are balanced and capacitor coupled. The balancing means that there’s an up transition physically next to any down transition which almost perfectly cancels out any RFI/EMI. The (balanced) capacitive coupling keeps out most of the conducted noise from one board to the other.

Ferrites would, in principle be good for the ground connections over the ribbon cable, but they can’t be too close to the signals without causing damage and the grounds are also used to shield signals from each other on the ribbon cable, so using ferrites on the ribbon cable doesn’t seem like a good idea all around.

Not speaking officially for PS Audio, but PS Audio has been fairly liberal with allowing upgrades, if the upgrade isn’t responsible for damage they usually honor the warrantee, etc.

A 12 PSU upgrade isn’t a bad idea, but care has to be taken to not cause unexpected interactions, e.g. to make sure that it’s power transformer doesn’t interact with the audio output transformers, that it’s ground is exactly tied to the current power supply ground (i.e. not the case), that the 12V doesn’t dip too low or go too high, especially on power up and down (the analog card is assuming a reasonably regulated 12V supply and filters it a lot from there.)

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Ted, your knowledge seems to be limitless. Always fascinating reading your explanations…

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If ever you visit South Africa, you’re welcome to visit for as long as you wish, Ted. The barbeques, whiskey etc is on me - just bring your soldering iron.

Not the same price level…The Terminator price is $4,250.00 US. The DS is $6,000.00 US.

Sure but DS, being most expensive, was not the favorite. i hope son-of-red-cloud lets DS take on all comers under $10k.

Here is the new price leader audio darling…Lab12 DAC1 SE…$2,000.00 US

https://hometheaterreview.com/lab-12-dac1-special-edition-reviewed/

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“I don’t fall for the High price means better performance thing.”

Recently I listened the Esoteric Grandioso combination D1 mono DACS. P1 SACD / CD player and G1 master clock ( clock was only on loan to the dealer )…

I have to say it sounded wonderous … Hard to articulate it - really has to be experienced to feel the emotion it creates.

The dealer praised highly P S Audio - which also sells, but he places the Esoteric on another level, how he wants me to road test it at home to experience the full potential, etc. – but the cynic in me reckons he just wants to hook me and haul me in…………! Wildly expensive, somewhere in the region of 75K…

When I returned home and listened to my system with the DMP & DS I didn’t sit thinking this sounds pitiful, compared to what I’d heard through the Esoteric range. Performance wise: I feel the DMP & DS hold up well, but, when you get into the stratospheric high-end, with the likes of dCS and Esoteric, etc. yes - you get incredible sound quality - but equally important, they are immaculately presented, with perfect fit and finish - all controls and functions work faultlessly, every time. But you would expect nothing less given the outlay: But I could never justify spending 75K - it is simply too much outlay on a Transport and 2 x DACs that can be old hat in next to no time.

Yes, P S Audio lacks the fit and finish: but we get regular firmware revisions to their products, all free of charge, pushing the product further on.

My next listen to the Esoteric Grandioso combination will be a 3 way at home against the DS and the TSS … !

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My statement was to the fact that just because something has a ridiculously unjustifiable price tag that it will necessarily sound better. The other issue is when comparing products the process should be done in the system that you are most familiar with. There are too many variables that can affect ones perception of what they are auditioning. The way various components, cables and environment can have a significant effect on the outcome. Anything beyond the cost of the Directstream DAC and DMP is way out of my league anyway. I get allot of satisfaction that what I am hearing is right up there with the rest of the offerings and I did not have to mortgage my home to get them. By no means are they low cost either!

I couldn’t agree with you more. The DMP & DS are incredibly musical products and right up there with the ridiculously expensive. I wouldn’t be without the DMP & DS: DS was the first PSA product I bought and still my favourite . It was the catalyst that started me on the PSA road trip… Esoteric is wonderful but at a price the DMP & DS equally wonderful and reasonably priced to boot !

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Hi again @tedsmith

I’m seriously considering being an early adopter of the TSS. What you’ve described in these threads sounds like it’ll be a DAC that takes everything I love about the DS to its practical extremes. I just want to sanity check one of my expectations with you if that’s OK…

Will the TSS finally be the Great Leveller of digital transports? Will it make a bitperfect but noisy and jittery SPDIF source sound like a DMP over I2S?

The DS is the best in this regard that I’ve ever heard but input quality still matters to a degree. The TSS design sounds like it has the potential to eliminate those differences except maybe for one challenge: source clock tracking. I’d really appreciate your thoughts in response.

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I suspect the TSS will be the least cable, transport, etc. sensitive DAC out there or at least one of the least sensitive ones under $100k, etc. It will help to deal with groundloop issues, etc. in systems, but even a perfect DAC that isn’t affected by jitter, power, grounding and that doesn’t radiate or conduct noise back out still has to be hooked up to the rest of your system and therefor likely create another groundloop which may or may not be audible. The TSS should help in a few ways, separating the digital grounding from the analog grounding, having multiple grounding options that should allow you to better match the rest of your system, etc.

I’m not sure what you are asking about clock source tracking. The DS (and the Jr and TSS) don’t get ahead or behind the incoming data so, in that sense they track perfectly. When being used in a playback only system (i.e. not as a part of a recording studio, etc.) there’s no need for a master clock going to the DS, it’s clock already likely has lower jitter (low end phase noise) than any master clock you could use anyway.

I usually do my demos with TOSLink thru a USB converter which generates enough noise/jitter that some DACs can’t track them at all.

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Thanks, that’s pretty much what I was hoping to hear. (And now all I can hear is my wallet cringing…)

I run balanced interconnects from my DS DAC into a power amp which has a fully balanced, differential architecture - so no ground loops on my analog side. I’d like to go back to Toslink again on the input side but for the time being I’m getting more musical enjoyment using a Curious USB cable from the same SqueezeBox Touch acting as Roon endpoint.

I wrote “source clock tracking” referring to the way that you use the VCXO to adjust the DS DAC’s clock speed to match the recent average rate of the incoming signal (edit: for inputs other than USB). That is the most effective jitter reduction scheme I’ve had the pleasure of using but if it were perfect then Toslink would be the best audio source for the DS with no exceptions.

But the act of varying your output clock is in itself the creation of jitter… so even if you can separate the analog from digital sections into different box and electrically isolate them, there’s still some kind of phase noise in the analog output caused by the adjustments made to the master clock as you track what is effectively the moving average of the input over some small period of time. I’m hoping that this clock tracking jitter is so close to zero as to be negligible, and that the reason the Toslink input’s jitter matters in the DS is because it somehow results in electrical noise inside the chassis.

BTW, I had a little flash of affection/nostalgia at your (Ted’s) mention of ECL. The breakthrough product for me in the field of computer-based music playback was the Audiophilleo USB-to-SPDIF converter. One of the design features contributing to its performance was the ECL-based SPDIF output driver.

The source clock tracking isn’t the source of output jitter in the DS. It a mix of the bleed of digital power supply modulation to the analog board (some of the digital board power supply noise is unavoidable in that there’s input hardware and input processing in the FPGA), potentially noise coupled magnetically thru the output transformers (tho we only see a little noise from the AC power transformer on the Audio Precision, we know that we can hear more in some circumstances than we can measure with the AP) and finally even tho the signals from the digital boards to the analog board are differential, low voltage swing and capacitor coupled there’s still some noise / jitter passed from the digital board to the analog board. That’s one reason there are multiple levels of reclocking in the TSS.

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Ted Will the new DAC have an Ethernet input, in other words a built in Bridge?

magicknow

The bridge function will be handled by the new Octave/Music server strategy - I don’t know the details. The display/control process will be much more powerful than the current bridge and will be able handle the streaming functions, there will be an Ethernet jack/connection to the control processor and I2S from the control processor to the FPGA with plenty of bandwidth. Bridge like functions will be implemented in software and or externally with, say a music server. I just wanted to keep the bridge hardware/software stuff away from the guts of the digital box and make sure that it’s use is optional (and the hardware can be powered down when not used) for those that don’t want to use it. Beyond that PS Audio will be designing it.

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