Is DSD reaching my DAC?


I own a Jolida Glass FX Tube Dac III that I had upgraded for DSD. I use a SONY UBP-X700 Blu-Ray player as a transport and mainly use a SPDIF Coax cable into the DAC. I have my transport set to send DSD via the HDMI connection. But, I read that DSD (DSF files) can’t be sent as such via coax. Since my DAC has no indicator about what file type is playing, all I know is that the transport signals that DSD is being sent. To increase the chance of getting DSD, I recently added an HDMI audio extractor which has the HDMI entering the box and a choice of coax, toslink, or analog out. This may be academic since I’m not sure I’m even capable of hearing the difference between DSD and Redbook, but I’m just wondering if I have real DSD when using coax or toslink out of the extractor. I assume that the analog must be real DSD since it’s directly connected to the HDMI.

I was also surprised that the quality of the analog output of the $22 HDMI extractor is very close to that of the DAC, which cost several hundred dollars. The main difference is that the Jolida output is louder and a little more detailed than the cheap DAC built into the extractor. At least it’s nice to have a spare $22 DAC in case the better one ever is down. Both DAC’s actually sound excellent. If anyone is curious about the extractor, it’s the Amazon Basics brand.

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