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Douk Audio U2 Mini - Absolutely BRILLIANT

tabarddn51

tabarddn51

Super Member
Hi I was looking for a new Dac as my D50s through the computer was lagging behind my SACD side of my system & I wanted to try to even things out. Anyway on browsing I found this unit a Douk Audio U2 Mini XMOS XU208 USB to Coaxial /Optical /12S Converter Digital Interface. It was around $40 including shipping from China. So I thought why not give it a try & I am sure glad I did. Now listening to some Hi Res files I had previously downloaded it is amazing the improvement this unit has bought to the computer set up. Easily as good as the SACD output, which I did not think was possible, in fact the bass content is if anything a little TOOO big on some tracks.


So I have no need for anything else now & the purchase has saved my about $700 as I was looking to go to the Topping D70.

Cheers
 
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Hi No idea, I just went off of the recommendations (Google the unit) & figured for the money, what have I got to loose!!

Cheer
 
What is 12s (i2s)?
i2s (not 12s) is the bus a DAC chip uses, in order for fx. an SPDIF signal to reach the DAC is has to be converted to i2s (as far as I know).
What is it?
The innards of this device shows what seems to be a high quality USB to SPDIF converter, with re-clocking USB input and two oscillators for the output, one for 44.1kHz and one for 48kHz and multiples there of.
Why use such a device?
Well your DAC may just have poor USB implementation, no USB input at all, or too low sample rates supported through USB.
Maybe you are tweaking the sound of your system, USB transports (as they are called) do affect the sound.
I use an M2Tech HiFace Two my self, the USB input on my Atoll DAC 100 is both too low sample rate and too poorly implemented.
Using a dedicated power supply with the HiFace improves it's sound, I'm sure the same is true for the Douk Audio U2 Mini as well.
 
KingBubba said:
What is 12S?
Click to expand...

I2S is a Philips interface standard for digital audio. It was developed as a means to send digital audio between processing chipsets for CDs.

It has more recently been adopted as a digital interface for stanadlone DAC units. One benefit over SPDIF is that I2S uses a discrete (separate) clock signal, whereas SPDIF uses a biphase encoded clock embedded in the data signal that has to be recovered; this can lead to jitter.

The I2S clock can be provided by the data source, or the data destination. The latter situation mimics an integrated CD player, where the DAC clock is the system timing master, and the CD read mechanism is slaved to this clock. In a standalone DAC, this allows the clock to be timing master, so it doesn't need to recover the clock. Again, this improves sample timing jitter.

Unfortunately, I2S was intended for use within a piece of equipment (Inter-IC Sound), so there is no defined standard physical or electrical interface for use between pieces of equipment. The HDMI connector has been subverted for I2S use by some manufacturers, but there is no agreed pinout or electrical/logic sense for this.

I²S - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org
 
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Cheers, So was I. I am using the optical connection to connect my Douk to my Topping D50s, which does not have i2s. So for me it was not an issue.

Cheers
 
@KingBubba and @onwardjames
I’m having trouble too! Haha
I have been reading the ‘DAC’ and ‘digital sources’ forums for a few weeks trying to get my mind around all this.
Another week and I might be ready to ask a half intelligent question-maybe. For now, I lurk and dream of a decent lossless front end.
 
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