The main impetus for the revisions and the upgrades was the new USB output. I was never happy with the ‘PCIe to USB’ card approach. You can get nice sound with them but the music is, for me, lost. It becomes mechanical. This does not seem to bother a lot of audiophiles, given how they seem to like the digital audio that uses this approach. I should not say too much on that point as I really don’t want to be negative about other peoples’ products or taste. I just want to describe how I was a bit frustrated when the PCIe technology was introduced many years ago. It drove me to start the Oladra project - to figure out how to move forward without using PCIe.
I was also never very happy with USB regenerators. The available methods were kludgy, and they were always a few steps forward and a few steps back. It also seemed to me that the audiophile world would see the benefits of adopting I2S and you could see this beginning to happen when I was developing the K50. Sadly that has not eventuated.
What has eventuated, is that new technology has become available that does the USB regeneration ‘properly’. I put that in parentheses because this is only my opinion, not a statement of fact. We have known about the development efforts into this new technology for a while now and so we have been waiting for it to become available in the quantities we need in order to go into production.
Basically, it has enabled us to wrap our technology around some new technology to make a stunningly good USB output. A conventional implementation of the new technology yields something halfway between the existing USB output and the S/PDIF or AES3 outputs, but wrapping our best technology around it closes all of the remaining gap. It really responds to our power supply technology.
So to bring the new USB to the K Series, we really needed to work through implementing the Oladra-style power supply in the K Series, or the USB would still be inferior to the other outputs.
We know a lot of our users really want to use USB, because of the benefits in playing high bit-rate files, and I2S has simply not become a reality in the DAC market. Resolving that has driven the intensive work that has gone into these revisions. And my sense is that delaying the new USB would be disappointing for many of our customers.
If you want a description of the new USB, then my main impression is that it has gone from a bit electronic and mechanical (ie you did not feel the music, you just heard it), to being juicily, gorgeously musical. Some of you will prefer it to the other outputs. Some of you will prefer one of more of the other outputs over the USB, but this will be driven more by the DAC and the connecting cables to the DAC. It is the first time I have felt USB has entered the ring.
At the same time as this was happening, the cost of bringing enterprise-level resilience had reached an affordable level so we decided to adopt it, and the work required for this enabled us to make some breakthroughs with the firmware tuning of all of the motherboards which results in a significant leap in ease and detail for all models.
So, the impetus was the USB output because we saw it as urgent for some users, but that drove us to make a raft of improvements before dropping this on all of you.