Via VT1730 & VT 1731 DXD Interface Chip

Via, the Taiwanese company known for producing IC's for the computing industry at highly competitive prices, has announced a DXD compatible set of chips for there new USB Audio Interface generation.

Hopefully this will allow cheap and common consumer goods to support DXD rate PCM, though the quality will have to be evaluated, it is the first step towards broader acceptance of the format.

I missed this when it was announced May 16, 2011, and am not aware of any products currently using it.

Sadly it seems Via, despite low price, do not respond to requests for evaluation kits from individuals. Hopefully this is another step toward common availability of DXD interface for consumers.

USB-Dual-Audio now named UDA, 2 Versions coming.

The USB-Dual-Audio from ElectrArt in Japan is now named the UDA. This will hopefully assist in finding it in searches, USB-Dual-Audio was IMHO too generic a name to yield proper search results.

The Newest release of the UDA mentioned on ElectrArt's website will apparently come in two versions. One called the "DoP" version, supporting the new dCs standard of DSD packed PCM and no recording facility. The other the "standard" version with a proprietary driver, and supporting recording and playback of DSD.
This makes the UDA compatible with many pieces of software, though it seems it can not be upgraded to achieve this functionality, and a new revision of the hardware is required.

There was a board shown giving SDIF support over BNC for interoperability with standard DSD equipment, a big feature. I have been waiting for this for years, and a major plus for studio use.  Hopefully the boards will be available soon, they have been shown for the past 6 months on the ElectrArt blog.

In addition, since the first release (1.0, which is the version I have) the clocks have been replaced with the excellent NDK NZ-series oscillators. The UDA features discrete oscillators, at 22.5792Mhz and 24.5765Mhz, for 44.4khz*X or 48Khz*X, respectively.