confused over DAC's

I haven't heard any difference between transports, why ould there be, unless the transport is doing some DSP of it's own or the DAC has a faulty s/pdif input.
Keith.

 

I once heard a difference with a transport, that used a SMPS, and I can only presume it put noise on the ground line that disturbed the clock recovery of the DAC. The sound of this transport was more hard and fatiguing than my other transport that had dual linear supplies.

 

sorry...complete hogwash

any off your cloth eared lot want to pop round and listen to a £30 upsampling dvd player against a quad 99cdp through a
dax decade is very welcome

you will not be saying transports make no difference after

then we could use any of my six other cdp's ranging from unmodded arcam a5's to super modded a5 a la avondale nd more ..a modded denon dc693[?]

the reason cheap transport sound rubish is that there cheap ....if the case your trying to make is that a £25 dvd player via a decent dac can compete with a hifi cd transport then why doesn't everyone use them ?


and if you insist in this charade at the very least you should not be offering such bias advice in my opionion.

its such a simple thing to do ....to hear the difference , just nip up to tesco ...buy a sh*te dvd player and compare to your posh dedicated cdp. As I say I know ...I've done it just to check ......

 

look all , transports make a huge difference as we at the recording studios in mid and late 70's were faced with jitter and the myth that cd's could never suffer from layer damage, oh i give up, sorry.

 

Sorry that just isn't good enough.

Tell us why a cheap transport is automatically inferior - show us the evidence please.

I've a cheap own brand Maplin DVD player here that cost £35. Happy to put up some files for you to compare against a Meridian. You happy to take the blind test??

 

Now that sounds like an interesting bakeoff. Let me know when you fancy doing it.

 

Nando -
I think the key words here are "up to spec". If the data stream is fine (as it should be) and it's strobed ok to the DAC then there will be no differences detectable except by expectation bias/placebo/sighted test problems and so on. If the transport is not up to spec then yes there will be a difference - I've no idea if the "sh**te" players you mention are up to spec or not - if so then they will be, in performance terms, equal to the best of the rest! Tests of files produced as in the above "bake off" would be most interesting.

I'm pretty much in favour of ABX blind tests to check these things out. This reminds me of an interesting AES paper (which passed peer review if I recall correctly, unlike a lot of the so called tests we hear about) containing fairly contentious results with reference to "hi resolution vs CD standard files".

Here's a link to the paper and a bit of background:

www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=14195

www.bostonaudiosociety.org/explanation.htm

Quite amusing.

 

Neil Hi, recently at the Scalford show, a blind 24/96 v 16/44.1 comparison was run, with the participants able to choose between inputs at will.
One chap managed to pick the 24/96 file every time, I asked him what he listened for and he said there was just less digital artefacts on the hires file!
interesting experiment.
Keith.

 

;-), but more digits

 

quote

hi neal, good sense of theory on your response to this issue, how ever as this my last response to this thread unless one of you can answer this:
transport not only reads the info on a cd but it has to create on the most capable memory of all information on data, bear in mind that dsta only goes to 196 khz, the transport has a duty to perform as to how much signal info to feed to the dac, there for both dac and transport mast match and co=ordinate to give as much info available, transports MATTER.

 

I'll try to answer that in a sort of non-techy way, but before I do I'd like to agree with your "match and coordinate" statement - I think I know what you mean but I'd rather say it's the "coordination" you speak of and NOT the transport that matters.

Firstly lets agree on the fact that digital data (which comes from the transport) is merely 1s and 0s.
That being so if we do a little experiment - find a cheap £50 or so CD/DVD player with a digital output. Next if we were to "record" your favourite CD into your computer from this we'd get these same 1s and 0s - put the same CD into your computer drive and "record" it with EAC or another ripper. Finally borrow the most expensive CD transport you can get your hands on and "record" the CD again. The resulting sound files will be identical.

Any difference in sound from a transport comes from jitter - the time alignment of the data ie the 1s or 0s being transmitted slightly earlier or later than should be the case. If you use a clock in the DAC this is eliminated (like the dpa deltran sync-lock I mentioned earlier - or the Linn equivalent) This is because when the "jittery" data arrives at the DAC, it is temporally quantized in sync with the DAC clock thus solving the problem to a great extent.

 

Transports certainly matter to all the dealers/manufacturers trying to sell them!
Keith

 

Can you hear the difference between a well recorded original CD and a self-burned copy?

 

Clearly we have persons sat on both sides of the fence. I'd be happy to host a bake off. I have a couple of DACs that we can use, and an old DVD player kicking around.

Who's up for trying this out?

 

Is it possible to do it blind? You'd need a digital switch-box that people can agree isn't going change the results.

 

Hi Mike,

We can do it here.

Two transports into a dac with the files uploaded so that anyone can download and listen.
Thats a truly blind listening test.

We can also take the digital outputs of a cheap DVD drive and something better and present those files.

Plus of course try the null - difficult but pretty much 'case closed' if it works.

 

hi neal, i understand what you are saying, but answer me this, data read by source and sampled to match input to a dac does it not have to marry both data rather then going up sampling?

 

I'd prefer to do it at my place, simply because I believe my system to be fairly revealing and I know what it sounds like.
I see no reason why we can't set the room up to allow blind swapping of kit around.