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Gear / Technical Help => Recording Gear => Topic started by: loughney on June 08, 2023, 05:56:30 PM
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Looking for a box to connect either optical or SPDIF /Coax to USB, to digitially transfer some recordings. Looking at this: ESI U24 XL | 24-bit USB Audio Interface for PC & Mac with S/PDIF I/O
Any other options? I would be looking at utilizing my laptop's USB/Thunderbolt port.
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I use it, nice gear.
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If you want to go cheaper than $100 there's bunches of these available used for around $35. They have coax but not optical if that matters.
https://reverb.com/item/68124850-tascam-us-144-mkii-usb-audio-interface-vg-condition-2010s (https://reverb.com/item/68124850-tascam-us-144-mkii-usb-audio-interface-vg-condition-2010s)
During the pandemic when I was transferring boatloads of DATs I used a SD USBPre v1. People were giving them away and I got mine for less than $100 but I just looked at Reverb and Ebay and that seems to not be the case any longer.
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Without actual testing its difficult to know whether any of these interfaces are indeed bit-accurate, many resample as a matter of course, which is convenient for interoperability but not ideal for your data stream itself
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Without actual testing its difficult to know whether any of these interfaces are indeed bit-accurate, many resample as a matter of course, which is convenient for interoperability but not ideal for your data stream itself
Bit accuracy on digital sources is pretty much a thing of the past - as is worrying about it. Almost every modern device resamples the digital input before sending it to the output. In a blind test 100 out of 100 people wouldn't know the difference.
Not trying to be argumentative - the original post was giving an example of a device in the $100 range. Any device in that price range is going to resample. Even very highly regarded digital devices like Benchmark, for example, use asynchronous resampling in the absence of a master clock as do almost all USB devices by nature.
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youre probably right about most USB devices resampling. And of course resampling is better than it was back in the day when people used creative cards, etc. so in theory its less undesirable
i still prefer to not resample my digital data, and shy away from USB interfaces in favor of PCI-based solutions or the cheap and common standalone recorders with digital in, which again generally start over $100
as always, you get what you pay for.
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Without actual testing its difficult to know whether any of these interfaces are indeed bit-accurate, many resample as a matter of course, which is convenient for interoperability but not ideal for your data stream itself
Bit accuracy on digital sources is pretty much a thing of the past - as is worrying about it. Almost every modern device resamples the digital input before sending it to the output. In a blind test 100 out of 100 people wouldn't know the difference.
Not trying to be argumentative - the original post was giving an example of a device in the $100 range. Any device in that price range is going to resample. Even very highly regarded digital devices like Benchmark, for example, use asynchronous resampling in the absence of a master clock as do almost all USB devices by nature.
Thanks, this is helpful.