The UNIVERSAL i2S interface

The i2S interconnection between sources and DAC became popular in the last year mainly because it transports the signal at their original nature and not assembled together so to be transported in an asynchronous connection.
To do not lose the possibility to interface almost any device present on the market, a universal i2S interface is available for the whole ZeroUno family.

Any product of the ZeroUno family can guest the i2S input, of any nature, at the price to loose one of the standard digital inputs, cinch or AES/EBU or Optic or USB.

The possible configurations are:

  1. the standard ZeroUno: SPDIF RCA, AES/EBU3, USB, OPTIC
  2. the ZeroUno with the i2S input: SPDIF RCA, i2S HDMI, USB, OPTIC (AES/EBU3 is cancelled)
  3. the ZeroUno with the i2S input (optional configuration): i2S RJ45, i2S HDMI, USB, OPTIC, (AES/EBU3 and SPDIF RCA is cancelled)
  4. the ZeroUno with the i2S input (special configuration): SPDIF RCA, AES/EBU3, USB, OPTIC, i2S RJ45, i2S HDMI (all the digital inputs + HDMI & RJ45 i2S)
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Description

Beside the fact, that in the area of digital audio meanwhile streaming from internet platforms like TIDAL, QOBUZ and others is the most popular way of listening to music at home (beside listening to analog records of course….), there is a group of customers, which still enjoys listening to CDs. They even invest in new high quality CD transports to get the best from those CDs.
As another interesting fact, the audio industry promotes more and more the I2S digital format over the established S/P-DIF to exchange the audio data between a CD-T and a DAC.
Unfortunately, there is no international standard as well for the physical connectors as the way in which the individual pins of those connectors are coded. In the end, each company offering an I2S output on their CD-T uses a proprietary solution to connect to their in-house-built DAC, which comes with a proprietary input connection too. Customers looking to buy a CD-T and a DAC from different companies have no chance to make a choice of their own – they are locked into proprietary solutions!

Also customers, which already own a high quality DAC and now want to invest into a CD-T with an I2S output realize, that their DACs usually do not offer an I2S input at all.

CanEVER AUDIO® always looks for smart solutions and all the DACs in the CanEVER AUDIO® family now offer an optional I2S input, which can be individually configured with the connector needed to interface with a number of CD transports from different.

Unfortunately, the i2S interface is not standardized and there are many variants, different from one vendor to the other.

All the products of the ZeroUno DAC family can interface almost all the several different physical connectors on the market to link a CD-T:

  • 1x 19 pins HDMI connector (balanced signals)
  • 1x 8 pins RJ45 connector (unbalanced signals)
  • 1x 5-6 pins DIN connector (unbalanced signals)
  • 1x 9 pins D-SUB connector (unbalanced signals)
  • 4x BNC connectors (unbalanced signals)

The interface is optional and can be installed instead of one of the SPDIF based digital inputs already present.