shadorne
Responses from shadorne
| The Great DAC Mystery @knownothing I have no experience with Chord or JRiver. I don’t doubt your observations are correct - they seem to match what is observed by many others. Chord M-scaler is clearly a design intended to improve upsampling filters over the conventi... | |
| The Great DAC Mystery @sudnh Yes for sure the analog side of a DAC is important - the output with or without volume control is where the rubber hits the road! Absolutely! | |
| The Great DAC Mystery @sudnh Do you mean the type of output (rca or balanced), output level, and if there is volume control? Or the final analog output filter design and buffer? Or the degree of separation of digital from analog side of things? For sure there’s a... | |
| The Great DAC Mystery @desktopguy RCA long Black plates are goldilocks to my tastes - just right! | |
| The Great DAC Mystery @rbstehno So you concur that upsampling on a DAC chip is not as good as a manufacturer custom upsampling on a FPGA. I agree fully. | |
| The Great DAC Mystery @sns R-2R in NOS mode will indeed not suffer from upsampling artifacts, as there is de facto no upsampling. Proponents of R-2R emphasize the purist approach to the conversion. That said, in NOS mode the R-2R DAC may still benefit from high quali... | |
| The Great DAC Mystery @asctim The late Julian Dunn - known for the invention of the “J-test” - postulated in an AES paper that pre-echos could be the reason why higher resolution digital audio sounded better. Julian wrote some of the manuals for Audio Precision on DA... | |
| The Great DAC Mystery @asctim Yes I agree. Typical DAC 2x upsampling filter will have 0.7 msec pre and post echoes of amplitude -67db of main signal. It’s incredibly small but certainly in theory, this is in the actual humanly audible range, and considering the pre-e... | |
| The Great DAC Mystery @asctim What you refer to seems to be the conventional wisdom and accounts for 99% of the literature. However this Gibbs ringing is not audible to the majority of people as the frequency is at the transition frequency of the filter (the point wher... | |
| The Great DAC Mystery Great insights shared here. All of them, including those who advise there is no holy grail to be had and just keep trying until you find what you like. I get all that but the nerd in me is always curious - especially as the differences I hear are ... | |
| Which DAC as a preamp? @hicksmore RCA coax is intended for digital signals. I suggest to try the M6S RCA analog output with simple analog RCA cables. | |
| MQA? @justjames72 You can’t dismiss the facts by attacking the messenger. MQA adds distortion. This is a fact. Only the original lossless file has the full bit depth and correct phase preserved. MQA is both lossy and adds phase distortion (high freq... | |
| MQA? MQA just adds distortion. The original full resolution version of any digital file (same master) always sounds better because they are lossless. MQA claims are entirely false. | |
| What was your first big eye opener with regard to audio? That a good quality pre-amp is really important and that phase is very important to me. I hear phase issues in bass as well as high frequencies as well as phase consistency across the entire spectrum: I can’t enjoy MQA for this reason - too much p... | |
| Metal cabinet speakers @kosst_amojan I have Genelec in aluminium cabinets and they are surprisingly inert - you tap them and you get much less noise than a mdf cabinet. The shape and thickness may play a roll - Genelec’s aren’t square and everything is smooth and round... |