A thought experiment


Some time ago an OP was advised to avoid digital room correction inserted downstream of the dac, the rationale being artifacts created by additional ad and da conversions. That got me thinking. Suppose a digital music file goes through a dac, then an adc. Both units would be generally accepted as high quality. Would the final file be bit perfect to the original? I am not talking about simply sending the original file through both chips, but rather through the output stages of the dac as well. Assuming the answer is yes, now imagine the original digital signal passes through a chain of 50 da’s and 49 ad’s. The 50 dacs would all be different to avoid precision vs accuracy issues. How would the final file now compare to the original?
dbrewer12345

Showing 1 response by audioengr

The D/A has jitter in it and the A/D adds more jitter. It would degrade the result. You can test this with various DSP devices for crossover, room correction and equalization.

Much better idea to apply DSP in the digital domain and then just do D/A. Even then, the DSP has to be extremely good code to avoid artifacts and compression, such as Sonic Studio etc..

Steve N.
Empirical Audio