Trends Audio UD-10

[humanflyz]

I was looking at a USB digital transport so I could bring my Lavry back home for winter break, and this thing caught my eye.

I ordered on the 13th, got here to CA on the 15th from Hong Kong, so I'm very impressed with the shipping. I really like this thing, the build quality is solid. It's small but not feather-light. It has all the digital connection I'll ever need. I'm running the AES/EBU directly to my Lavry, out of my Dell laptop using foobar/ASIO. The thing just works as advertised, and the price is pretty decent too. I think I paid $105 including shipping.

[TheSloth]

Do we know anything about the circuit design?

Found it.

[humanflyz]

Do we know anything about the circuit design?

Well, I'm not much of a tech guy, so I have no idea what to make of the features quoted on their page:

- high-end Burr Brown PCM2704 IC for USB audio conversion

- proprietary dual power regulation circuits design (normal implementations are just directly apply the 5V USB bus power). No matter the power is supplied from the USB bus or from external socket, it is regulated before supply to the related ICs. Dual regulated powers are supplied to digital circuits and analog circuits individually.

- separated digital/analog ground. The digital GND (network) and the analog GND (solid) is totally separated except connected via a ferrite bread in a single point. It effectively reduce interference between digital signals and analog signals.

- Option to use USB bus power [convenient] or external power [better sound] (e.g. AA size rechargeable battery 1.2V x4=5V, don't use normal batteries with 1.2V x4=6V, it would be too high for safety and good sound performance)

- 4pins high accuracy crystal clock (?10ppm)

- applied RS422 driving IC to concurrently drive 4 groups of balance & non-balance digital outputs. Audiophiles can compare the differences between these digital outputs instantly or play for the Bi-DACs or even Quad DACs.

- proprietary impedance matching circuits for AES/EBU(110ohm), Coaxial(75ohm) digital outputs

- applied the specially designed pulse transformers for each AES/EBU and Coaxial outputs to further isolated interference from UD-10 to the external DAC. The most pure, accurate, standard digital signal is then regenerated with minimum interference and jitter.

Somebody more technically-inclined might want to break this down for us?

[TheSloth]

It's the pretty standard way of doing USB - S/PDIF conversion, but it seems well put together. I wonder what the jitter figures are like.

[hungrych]

Cool, that's just what I'm gonna need soon! What's the url?

EDIT: nvm found it http://www.trendsaudio.com/EN/Index.htm

[Iron_Dreamer]

Looks very cool. If it cost a bit less, I might have bought if just for the hell of it. Maybe I still will someday. As it is though I've got a laptop with bit-perfect optical output, the RME, and a couple of IHP-120's, so I've got plenty of digital outputs