Help me connect my Ultra to my Oppo BDP-105...

[motleypixel]

I hope this plan pans out for me. I just picked up a MINT Oppo BDP-105, it's basically a very high quality multi disk format player with two ESS Sabre32 Reference DACs. Why 2? Well one is shared for optical/coax/hdmi and the other is dedicated to the balanced XLR output, which is what I will be using, connecting the L/R XLR to my L/R mono block amplifiers.

Current setup is an Ultra, SMSL P-100 CD transport, Pioneer PL-510A TT, Fosi BT30D Pro amp, and a pair of passive speakers and an active sub where it's connected to the Ultra via coax LFE. The CD transport is connected via optical and of course the TT is connected to the phono stage L/R RCA/gnd.

What I want to do now is remove the SMSL P0100 cd transport, replace the Fosi BT30D Pro amp with two Fosi V3 mono blocks using XLR between them and the Oppo. I will still connect my active SW via LFE to the Ultra and my TT to the Ultra. What I feel is the best to do is connect the Ultra USB-A out to the Oppo USB-B (square printer type) digital input. Is this better than the coax out or optical out on the Ultra? If so why?

Finally, I have two older USB-A to USB-B cables, will they all work the same or should I buy a better one?

Thank you.

 

[HansD-NL]

Choose optical, this will provide galvanic isolation between the Ultra and the Oppo. Cool device by the way the Oppo, loads of functionality and seems well built.

 

[dtc]

The 105 was cutting edge in its day. Pretty sure that model also supports ripping SACDs with a little magic. I just retired my 93 so I could do 4K.

 

[motleypixel]

Choose optical, this will provide galvanic isolation between the Ultra and the Oppo. Cool device by the way the Oppo, loads of functionality and seems well built.

Interesting, I've never heard of this "galvanic isolation".

The USB input on the Oppo BDP-105 provides 2chl 192kHz PCM where as the coax/optical only provides 2chl 96kHz PCM but also Dolby Digital, DTS, and ACC all of which are audio codecs for video and I don't care about that.

With this info, would you still recommend optical?

Thank you.

 

[dtc]

All electrical signals have some degree of noise on them. It is usually too small to matter but can sometimes cause problems. Since the optical signal is light it disconnects any extraneous noise being based over the wires connecting the two systems. It is something to be considered but in most cases the effects of the electrical noise is pretty much irrelevant. Typically I would not give up functionality that you might use (in this case 24/192) for that isolation. But, the best way to tell is to do some testing.

You might also want to test the optical connection using the cable that Wiim ships. It passes 192 Khz which many optical cables do not. Because of the cable limitation some vendors used 92 KHz in their specs even though it could do 192 Khz. Easy to try.

 

[motleypixel]

All electrical signals have some degree of noise on them. It is usually too small to matter but can sometimes cause problems. Since the optical signal is light it disconnects any extraneous noise being based over the wires connecting the two systems. It is something to be considered but in most cases the effects of the electrical noise is pretty much irrelevant. Typically I would not give up functionality that you might use (in this case 24/192) for that isolation. But, the best way to tell is to do some testing.

You might also want to test the optical connection using the cable that Wiim ships. It passes 192 Khz which many optical cables do not. Because of the cable limitation some vendors used 92 KHz in their specs even though it could do 192 Khz. Easy to try.

Thank you, that makes sense, but what's all this jabber about "clocking" being better with USB?

Also, the DAC in the Oppo is a ESS Sabre32 Reference ES9018, actually two of them with one being dedicated to the XLR outputs and the Ultra has the ESS ES9038Q2M which is newer, with key differences being:

Technical specifications
ES9038Q2M (Ultra's):
Higher dynamic range (up to 129 dB)
Lower THD+N (down to -120 dB)
Supports up to 32-bit/768 kHz PCM and DSD512
Optimized for portable and low-power applications

ES9018 (Oppo's):
Slightly lower dynamic range (129 dB) *does this make sense? still same 129db as the Ultra's DAC?
Slightly higher THD+N (-120 dB) *does this make sense? still same 129db as the Ultra's DAC?
Supports up to 32-bit/384 kHz PCM and DSD128 *I am pretty sure I'm stuck with the Oppo playing DSD SACD layers through it's DAC, meaning even if I wanted to send to the Ultra the only way is via HDMI 1.2a as it's blocked via digital. And further so the Ultra's HDMI is for ARC only so should not be a concern here.
"Sabre32 Reference" class, designed for a variety of applications

What I feel is they are very comparable DACS and even if the Ultra's is slightly better on paper, the Oppo's circuitry/build/power for there DAC is superior and could actually sound better? IDK?

Thank you.

 

[hgo58]

Thank you, that makes sense, but what's all this jabber about "clocking" being better with USB?

There is no clock associated with the USB audio data, so the receiver must provide its own clock. For the SPDIF optical the clock is imbedded in the data, so it is senders clock that is used by the DAC (unless it re-clock it).

So the USB is only better in this regard, if the receiving unit has a better clock than sender. A bad optical cable may however disturb the clock while the USB connection don't do that, so many people prefer to let the receiver provide the sample clocking. A more expensive unit may also have a better clock but the WiiM Ultra have a pretty good clock so not really any need to not use it.

And why do the clock matter? A more precise clock mean lower jitter noise. The jitter noise from any modern DAC is however below the threshold of the human hearing. So I would not care about this at all.

 

[HansD-NL]

My advice is: Don't go down a rabbit hole. Both Dacs are transparent to the source. The DAC "magic" has been solved for years now and for sure some brands will make mistakes in the implementation but that's rare these days.

 

[motleypixel]

My advice is: Don't go down a rabbit hole. Both Dacs are transparent to the source. The DAC "magic" has been solved for years now and for sure some brands will make mistakes in the implementation but that's rare these days.

This makes sense, but I want to leverage the XLR out of the Oppo to my mono-blocks because they are slightly better (based on science, and amirm's review of the V3 on ASR, data clearly shows the XLR to be better than the RCA input on that amp). So to do this I must connect the Ultra to one of the 3 Oppo's digital inputs (coax, optical or USB).

The Oppo will be set to always pwr on to this input and volume set static at 100%. I will limit's the Ultra's volume to about 65% which is probably 20% higher than I ever listen, and use the Ultra as my source pre-amp and volume control.

So, I'm going to do it, just trying to vet out which way and I think I'm going to setup a bench test with the USB and if it sounds good, then just stick with that.

Thank you.

 

[motleypixel]

There are no clock associated with the USB audio data, so the receiver must provide its own clock. For the SPDIF optical the clock is imbedded in the data, so it is senders clock that is used by the DAC (unless it re-clock it).

So the USB is only better in this regard if the receiving unit has a better clock than sender. A bad optical cable may however disturb the clock while the USB connection don't do that, so many people prefer to let the receiver provide the sample clocking. A more expensive unit may also have a better clock but the WiiM Ultra have a pretty good clock so not really any need to not use it.

And why do the clock matter? A more precise clock mean lower jitter noise. The jitter noise from any modern DAC is however below the threshold of the human hearing. So I would not care about this at all.

Thanks for that! I think I'm going to try USB first and see how that goes.