Honestly - it could be any of the items you mentioned. Your equipment seems decent enough. What did you use to feed the dac before the Denon? Could be the recording. If I were doing your test, I would probably start with a well-recorded piano or classical guitar to check the tonality of the instruments and the dynamics of the performer. If you're using a heavily-processed rock CD, the differences may be smaller.
CD Player/Transport Quandary
While I haven’t exactly been in the market for a disc player, from time to time I’ve thought it’d be nice to have one. A few days ago I spotted a Denon DVD-1940ci at a thrift store for $20, and although a fairly pedestrian unit, it does play SACD, and was fairly well received by both TAS and WhatHifi, so I snagged it.
I took the player home and hooked it up to my Black Ice Glass FX Dac via the coaxial output, and also connected the analog audio output to my preamp via another single-ended source input, so I could compare my outboard dac against the player’s internal dac by cycling back and forth between inputs.
This is where it gets weird, as when cycling between my dac and the player’s analog output, I found it EXTREMELY difficult to distinguish any substantial difference in SQ between the two. I drove myself crazy with this for a couple of hours before conceding that my dac had the slight edge in terms of spatial cues and high end sparkle, but these differences were extremely subtle. I’m fact I’m not entirely ruling out that these perceptions were psychological in nature.
This level of performance parity between my dac and a 13 year old player that retailed for $370 is unsettling, to say the least. I’m not sure what conclusions I should be drawing. That my dac sucks? My amp? My speakers? Or maybe it’s my ears that are trash?
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
My setup:
LSA-10 speakers
ARC LS25 mkii pre
CODA Stage 3 amp (rebadged by Legacy)
I took the player home and hooked it up to my Black Ice Glass FX Dac via the coaxial output, and also connected the analog audio output to my preamp via another single-ended source input, so I could compare my outboard dac against the player’s internal dac by cycling back and forth between inputs.
This is where it gets weird, as when cycling between my dac and the player’s analog output, I found it EXTREMELY difficult to distinguish any substantial difference in SQ between the two. I drove myself crazy with this for a couple of hours before conceding that my dac had the slight edge in terms of spatial cues and high end sparkle, but these differences were extremely subtle. I’m fact I’m not entirely ruling out that these perceptions were psychological in nature.
This level of performance parity between my dac and a 13 year old player that retailed for $370 is unsettling, to say the least. I’m not sure what conclusions I should be drawing. That my dac sucks? My amp? My speakers? Or maybe it’s my ears that are trash?
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
My setup:
LSA-10 speakers
ARC LS25 mkii pre
CODA Stage 3 amp (rebadged by Legacy)