Extensive review regarding comparisons between the Ultra and PRO - used as digital transports to external dac, results on page 3

[Suntoucher]

When RCA are involved, there is the possibility that 75 Ohm is not the real impedance involved.
Finding the best coupling among cable and inlets, should be matter of oscilloscope testing. Without a real view of what's happening, anything is speculation. Anyway, short lengths can help...

https://www.bluejeanscable.com/pages/technicaldocs/canarercap.pdf

 

[merifon]

https://www.bluejeanscable.com/pages/technicaldocs/canarercap.pdf

Well built but the "uncertain" part, are generally the gears inlets. Even in this forum if I remind well, there are measurement of WiiM Pro spdif, showing best coupling (better eye pattern), with 50 Ohm cable.
RCA are cheap alternative to the right ones (bnc) and circuit design of spdif circuit sometimes it's not accurate.
This doesn't mean the system couldn't work, simply it means that there aren't certainties, despite the prices.

 

[Musician]

Well built but the "uncertain" part, are generally the gears inlets. Even in this forum if I remind well, there are measurement of WiiM Pro spdif, showing best coupling (better eye pattern), with 50 Ohm cable.
RCA are cheap alternative to the right ones (bnc) and circuit design of spdif circuit sometimes it's not accurate.
This doesn't mean the system couldn't work, simply it means that there aren't certainties, despite the prices.

Onlyoneme did measurements of the eye pattern from spdif out , comparing Ultra with pro at 24 bit 192 kHz . The ultra is better.

 

[merifon]

Yes, ultra has better designed spdif interface and it well accomplishes nominal 75 Ohm load.
There was a thread where Onlyoneme measured better coupling on WiiM Pro, with 50 ohm load.
This could meaning that WiiM Pro has a problem but can't exclude that many cheap designed gears have also.
After all this, since modern dac's can handle very well even bad patterns, for me it's hard to believe that signal shapes on spdif cables, can give very specific and constant sound characteristics. Even in a direct comparison, the time spent to change cables (any kind of) and restart same listening, it's too log to be trusted and not became victim of some kind of bias.

 

[Aquarius]

Yes, ultra has better designed spdif interface and it well accomplishes nominal 75 Ohm load.
There was a thread where Onlyoneme measured better coupling on WiiM Pro, with 50 ohm load.
This could meaning that WiiM Pro has a problem but can't exclude that many cheap designed gears have also.
After all this, since modern dac's can handle very well even bad patterns, for me it's hard to believe that signal shapes on spdif cables, can give very specific and constant sound characteristics. Even in a direct comparison, the time spent to change cables (any kind of) and restart same listening, it's too log to be trusted and not became victim of some kind of bias.

Bingo! These differences are so small that it wont influence most DACs in a way that it should be differences on the analogue output

 

[alpha_zulu]

Confirmation bias is a big problem. As long as the tester knows that something has been changed, he will most certainly hear a difference. If you're the one making the changes (re-plugging cables), the test won't produce an uninfluenced result. In other words, without real blind tests, the significance is very low.

 

[merifon]

Confirmation bias is a big problem. As long as the tester knows that something has been changed, he will most certainly hear a difference. If you're the one making the changes (re-plugging cables), the test won't produce an uninfluenced result. In other words, without real blind tests, the significance is very low.

The perfect case, should not only be blind but even instantaneous. I agree that this last condition, it's generally hard to get... I was able to get instant switching, only in two cases: a CD player connected to same amplifier, by its analog outputs and with digital trough a dac connected on same amp. Cd was playing seamless and inputs switching made possible to compare without any delay. The second case were two mini's connected to two available toslink of an amp and one settled for Spotify, the other for Tidal 44.1KHz, with possibly synchronized same song edition. In both cases differences were earable, much more in the case of CD player but this it's just another personal opinion...

 

[Musician]

The perfect case, should not only be blind but even instantaneous. I agree that this last condition, it's generally hard to get... I was able to get instant switching, only in two cases: a CD player connected to same amplifier, by its analog outputs and with digital trough a dac connected on same amp. Cd was playing seamless and inputs switching made possible to compare without any delay. The second case were two mini's connected to two available toslink of an amp and one settled for Spotify, the other for Tidal 44.1KHz. In both cases differences were earable, much more in the case of CD player but this it's just another personal opinion...

Digital transports can sound slightly different depending mostly on the dac , but also if resampling or bittruncation has been done in the digital domain. A very common example is using Windows on a computer as a player ( without using ASIO or wasapi ) . Its bad sounding as a digital transport to a dac. The WiiM streamers are much better.

Another example of a terrible transport is using the cromecast audio puck with the Google cromecast server ( can be bettered using ROON ) . Amirm did some measurements on ASR.

In some terrifying cases the digital transport do worsening the sound more than the external dac does.

 

[adias]

Thanks, have been wondering if the BJC coax will fit «plug-size-wize»

They fit.

 

[Musician]

Completely blown away by the ability to play music from a SSD directly to the Ultra . No NAS with server program needed.
This is how the meny looks like:

 

[Smartplug]

All this storage capacity that they put in won’t be able to listen to all of them. Just handful of them will be played repeatedly. It’s nice to have the entire music collection on earth.