MPS-X User Manual
5
CONCEPT OF THE MPS-X AND THE PLINK INTERFACES
The MPS-X provides streaming connections from internet, network attached storage (NAS), USB sources
(computers, servers etc.) and other standard digital inputs. It carefully removes any incoming jitter by
Playback Designs' proprietary clocking and buffering system and then encodes all data natively to either the
standard Coax / AES outputs or the Playback Designs proprietary PLINK output. PLINK is a high quality fiber
optical link used on most Playback Designs equipment and it natively supports all formats of PCM and DSD.
Because its media is fiber optic it isolates the sensitive circuitry in your Playback Designs DAC from the
generally "noisy" digital sources with high clock jitter. This separation results in a dramatic sonic improvement
when compared to a direct connection with the DAC via for instance USB.
The first version of the PLINK interface was launched more than 15 years ago and supported DSD up to
5.6MHz. This version is called "Classic" and is implemented in the 5-series products and IPS-3 (that have not
been upgraded yet). As technology never sits still DSD has been expanded to 11.2MHz several years ago.
Accordingly, we also expanded the PLINK format and called it "Sonoma" reminiscent of its origin in the
professional recording tool for DSD (Sonoma workstation) that was developed by the founder of Playback
Designs during the development of the SACD and DSD formats.
PLINK does not use the same media as TosLink, it is rather based on a much higher quality and lower jitter
media that is used for very high bandwidth communication links where receivers require an extremely low
jitter signal for reliable decoding.
Cable specs: ST-ST fiber optic, multimode, 62.5/125µm.
For PLINK we
use a much lower bandwidth protocol than the specified limit of the media to further increase robustness
against jitter.
The MPS-X interface understands both formats, "Classic" and "Sonoma" (selectable in settings menu) and
has six digital inputs. Besides the standard AES, Coax and Toslink inputs it also has the following:
1. USB for PCM up to 384kHz and native DSD up to 11.2MHz
2. Streaming from network / internet. Various sources are supported such as network attached storage
(NAS), streaming services such as Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer, vTuner, Roon networks, DLNA based
networks.
3. PLINK input from other Playback Designs equipment. Used in connection with support for recording
through this device.
USB
TOSLINK
NETWORK
PLINK OUT
COAX OUT
Stream-X2
MPS-X Interface
AES
PLINK IN
COAX
AES OUT
Re-clocking Jitter removal
Block Diagram
Since the Coax interface standard is limited to max. 192kHz for PCM and single DSD, any audio passing
through the MPS-X at higher sample rates is down-converted with our proprietary high resolution algorithm to
176.4 / 192kHz for PCM and single rate DSD via DoP for DSD before sent out the AES / Coax outputs.
The PLINK output is never downsampled and always supports the native sample rate of the audio file.
