When I first discovered that this was the only way to transmit DSD files from an Apple computer to a USB DAC I was dismayed.  Buy virtue of the name itself I thought that the signal must have to be converted to a PCM signal and that would rain on the parade of native DSD goodness that has revived the world of high quality digital music.

Well, very thankfully that wasn’t the case.  The signal remains native DSD, it is just packaged up differently in order to be transmitted.  No PCM conversions are made.  Without going into technical details, think of it like this.  A 24 bit 384k PCM signal path is capable of transmitting (? MB/sec), so think of that as a very large pipe.  The DSD signal is in fact a far smaller pipe at ? MB/sec, so all that is done is to get the signal to flow inside this larger pipe.

More later…