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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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In Reply to: budget and other considerations... posted by yellowwwwducky on May 11, 2005 at 18:54:36:
Meitner combos probably within budget. Not necessarily so keen on combining products (d2a/pre in one box) given my Levinson experience. Look a bit industrial for my tastes; the player in particular while the d2a is 'ok'.You should see the Switchman pre-amp :)
You can use the DCC2 as a standalone DAC too. However, most everybody who has heard one prefers the sound when the DCC2 is connected directly to the amp, using its volume control. There seems to be a trend now to add volume control to high end CD players. I don't know who started it, Wadia maybe. Most everybody hears an improvement when they remove their pre-amp from the chain. But it's hard to take advantage of that feature unless you only have one source. That's one of the reasons why I like the DCC2. I hope we'll see more products in the future that combine a good DAC with minimalist pre-amp functionality.
However, I don't think the DCC2 offers a unity gain bypass option for its analog inputs, so if you connect an external surround processor or other multichannel source you'll have to calibrate at a known volume setting and return to the same volume setting every time you select that source - inconvenient.
They do not accomodate more than 96khz processing - and I am not sure how important that is.Right now, it's not important at all. Only DVD-A can provide >96k PCM, and DVD-A copy protection generally forces DVD-A players to downsample or disable the digital output. And even 96k PCM is only available on a handful of DADs (DVD-Video discs with unprotected hi-res PCM).
These are my leading contenders at the moment. I do not want tubes. I might get vinyl at some point (which I could get a rowland phono amp for). I just want the most likely future proof front end - granted I know that is tough to do. The dcs is out of my price range and I do not want to buy used - it is also imho so heinously ugly that I just could not stand to look at.Unfortunately, I think "future proof front end" is an oxymoron. Even if the formats don't change, the state of the art in digital audio reproduction is moving fast. Within 5 years, it's likely that even the Meitner gear will no longer be considered state of the art.
And Abe is right that SACD is not likely to become a dominant format. It's still growing and new titles are being released all the time, but mostly classical, jazz, and asian music. The major labels who were putting out some pop & rock SACDs have given up for now. It's likely that SACD is going to stick around for some time as a favored audiophile format, but even the format's biggest proponents realize that it's not going to replace the CD.
Dave
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Follow Ups
- Re: budget and other considerations... - Dave Kingsland 08:25:01 05/13/05 (0)
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