Please do. Max Townshend was a genius in understanding sonics and design. And ahead of his time.....
Townshend's Seismic vibration isolation products are fantastic. As are their cables.
AES/EBU vs RCA s/pdif into dac, RCA analog out
Hi, this seems like it may be a dumb question, but here goes. If you feed the digital signal into the dac via AES/EBU and then use the dac's analog RCA outputs to your preamp (preamp only has RCA input), would this result in a better sound than using the dac's RCA s/pdif digital inputs? Or would the results be exactly the same? I hope I'm making this clear: AES/EBU vs RCA s/pdif coax input in while using analog RCA out. I don't currently have an AES/EBU digital cable, or I would just try this out. I am considering purchasing one just to see if there's any difference. Thanks for any advice.
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- 14 posts total
OP, sounds like you have a lot of DACs. You might consider consolidating down to a N20 and a single DAC. I had a Berkeley Alpha Reverence 3 for a while. My Aurrender streamer only —> DAC (Audio Research Reference CD9SE) sounds best with AES… but not by much. From DAC to preamp XLR… but single ended high quality interconnects of the same brand and level sounded pretty much the same (Transparent Ultra - current iteration). |
@ghdprentice, please note that there is only one dac being used in my system. I am not using the built in dac in the Aurender A20, I am sending the A20's digital signal via USB to the Berkeley Alpha USB digital to digital converter which outputs the digital signal via AES/EBU or S/PDIF to the external Weiss DAC202. The Weiss DAC202 is doing the digital to analog processing. Thanks for your impressions about AES and single ended sound quality. |
Thanks @heymikey. That is my point. One really great DAC will sound better than one run of mill one. The higher quality the DAC, assuming it supports the sound quality you really like is much better than owning several. Put all your money in one great DAC and you are likely to enjoy the music much more. |
@ghdprentice yes, my goal is to purchase an end game dac when possible. As the cost of such a dac would be north of 10K, my plan for the time being is to optimize my current gear. While my Weiss DAC202 is an older model, it is still no slouch. Dac recommendations (under 8k) welcome. |
- 14 posts total