Today I got my Holo Audio Cyan 2 DAC for my RS150 in the bedroom.
Now I’ve the same problem like with the RS250 and the external USB Dac: Most of my USB cables here are not working.
At the moment, a noname cable let see the DAC, but not my “better” cable.
Ordered now an Intona USB 3.0 cable, which hopefully will work, but is here anyone using a Holo Audio DAC (I’m owning also a May and here exists the same problem with the Rose device) together with a RS150 connected successful through USB and can give an advertisement for a good (cheap) USB cable?
Check for Wireworld Cables (Ultraviolet), not too expensive. Not many Brand have implemented such an USB B 3.0 Connector. These were used to power external HDD when introduced. And USB 2.0 is the Standard within Audio - why Holo used 3.0, I don’t know. Maybe it was easier to implement.
Hi,
I have the Holo Audio Cyan 2 DAC with the RS250A.
Connected with a Supra Excalibur usb cable. It works perfectly and this cable is not too expensive.
Thanks, can then an option, if the itona cable doesn’t works.
I have literally tens of USB cables of different kinds. Some were cheap, some were “deluxe.” I don’t see any pattern whatsoever.
When I installed a new external drive on my computer, I figured I was best off using the cable that came with it. After months of chasing sporadic drive failures, I replaced that cable with a mid-priced one from a random company I’d never heard of. Problem solved.
I looked into getting a USB cable testing rig, but I could buy forty or fifty cables for the price of that equipment.
So unfortunately, I have to suggest trial and error. Remember that you’re dealing with a digital bitstream, so it’s not the same as audio cables. For the most part, a digital signal is either there or not there.
1 Like
How do you represent puls modulated signal throughout the wire? Meaning, cable don’t interfere at all?
Got my itona usb 3.0 cable (is an industrial cable) and it works without problems.
But again: This thread is not for debating of SQ and USB cable, but for finding usb cable, which are working with Rose devices and external DACs.
What travels on a USB is not pulse-modulated (PCM). It is digital data. That’s why you can use the same cable for disk drives, keyboards, and just about anything else digital.
The quality and type of a USB cable has to do with the speed it can handle and how well a signal goes from one end to the other. What makes a good cable, or a bad cable, is pretty much the same as any other kind of cable: what comes out should be the same as what goes in, no more and no less.
2 Likes
And digital data is what exactly and how does it ‘travel’ through the wire?
You may be sorry you asked, but hold onto your hat and follow me.
Let’s start with analog data. Analog data, for our purposes, is sound vibrations.
For simplicity, consider a sound system that does nothing but help somebody in the back of a hall hear what’s happening on the stage. A violinist is playing on the stage. That creates vibrations that are what we perceive as sound. The strings vibrate, the vibrations travel through the air, our eardrums vibrate, and our brains do the rest. What travels between the violin and the eardrum is analog.
Now, let’s suppose you use a microphone. The vibrations start at the violin as before, but instead of the eardrums in your head there’s something like an eardrum inside the microphone. At this point, the microphone does its magic. It turns the vibrations that travelled through the air into an electrical signal. If you were to somehow compare the sound vibrations that come into the microphone with the electrical signal that comes out, they’d match. (This is an imaginary simplification, but it fundamentally works that way.)
That electrical signal now starts moving along wires to your sound equipment, gets amplified (made bigger), and goes out through wires to your speakers. The speakers do the reverse of what the microphone did: they turn electrical signals back into sound vibrations, which make your eardrums vibrate.
The goal and challenge are to make sure that what comes out of the speakers is an exact match to what went into the microphone. The design of the microphone is critical. You want it to turn the physical vibration into an electrical signal accurately. The wires have to be very good at carrying the electrical signal accurately. That’s a matter of quality and materials: copper works well, gold might be better, and string wouldn’t work at all.
The electronics and the speakers have the same goal: move the electrical signal around as accurately as possible, then turn it back into an acoustic vibration that is identical to what came off the violin (only louder).
All of this is analog: the vibration of the violin string, the sound vibrations to the microphone, the electrical signals between the microphone and the speakers, and the sound vibrations between the speakers to your eardrums. Remember what I said about the sound vibrations and the electrical signals “looking” the same? The problem, as I said before, is that the electrical signal can be degraded due to bad wires, cheap speakers, or faulty electronics.
All of those problems have solutions, but an analog signal can get mucked up. It’s hard to put this into words, but if the analog signal gets squeezed, or stretched, or combined with another signal that doesn’t belong there, it just doesn’t sound quite right.
Now let’s look at digital data. Suppose that instead of turning sound vibrations (which are still analog) into an analog electrical signal, it turns them into numbers. The violin makes a C# vibration, and the microphone turns that C# into the number 554.37. That’s digital data. Digital data can be lost, but it can’t be distorted. If 554.37 goes in one end, then 554.37 comes out the other. There’s a lot of clever stuff along the line, but the bottom line is that either 554.37 comes out or nothing comes out. That’s digital data.
Things can still go wrong, of course, but digital data is harder to distort than analog data.
Modern digital signals are almost always expressed as 1s and 0s, which is another way of saying on or off. To do that, the number is expressed in binary. The number 5 turns into on-off-on, which means 101. 554.37 becomes 1000101010.0101110001101111. What makes a digital signal robust is that on-off stuff. You can’t have half on or one-third on.
There’s still one problem. Look at how many ones and zeroes (binary digits, or bits) it takes to express 554.37. You can’t have a separate wire for each bit. The simple way to handle this is by sending them one at a time.
Picture a metronome. It sits there, ticking away at a steady pace. Somebody is standing next to it. When the metronome ticks, they ring a bell—or they don’t. If they do, that’s a 1; if they don’t, that’s a 0. There’s your digital data.
Physically moving the digital data down the cable is just a matter of having the far end look for 1s and 0s at the right time.
In reality, there’s a lot of extra stuff going on. I’ve simplified things enormously, but that’s the principle of how digital data travels. In reality, you could use USB, optical fiber, or base drums. Each would have its own way of doing things.
That’s probably a lot more than you ever wanted to know, if you want more you can send me a message. Or you can spend some time with your favorite AI.
1 Like
I’m using his prime usb from a rose 250 into a holo cayan. Quite a profound improvement from the wireworld ultraviolet I was using before
again, discuss your SQ and USB cable on another place, but not here!
1 Like
Good luck with your search