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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: RE: Why does a ten year old NOS DAC sound so good? posted by Freo-1 on May 30, 2014 at 18:34:50:
Well, the Wavelength, IIRC, sold for about $3000 new, ten years ago or so (hardly vintage, though it uses some older technologies)
That's about $5000 in today's dollars. If you can't get a good sounding DAC for $5000, there's something wrong with the world.
But seriously, 95% of the products out there are mass produced for an audience who can't afford much more than a few hundred for a DAC, outboard or not.
It all has to do with filtering, input sample rate handling, oversampling, and the need to be compatible, the need to be mass produced, etc.
It is very difficult to get a DAC sounding right when it has to accept every input stream, every input sample rate, be under $1000, etc.
These days a DAC has to be an input switcher, a headphone amp, a preamp, blah blah, and if it doesn't have these features, won't sell because the competition has those features, etc.
The Wavelength has only USB input, IIRC. It uses proprietary coding on the USB input, I think. The rest, the tubes, transformers, power supply, etc., are not designed to be mass produced. Very few bother to spend so much on a DAC alone. The nonoversampling itself is only a small part of the solution. You can get a oversampling DAC to sound that good too, if you use all that nice hardware and get it right at the analog output stage.
Still, your question is a good one. The industry is too busy trying to solve every problem at once and make swiss army knife products at low prices, to get stuff really sounding good. AND the big companies have to keep changing formats to keep up with patent expirations. So HDMI, BlueRay, SACD/DSD, blah blah, none of which inherently improves sound.
Sony could have made a great sounding external DAC if it wanted to, but they're not interested in splitting up the digital signal chain because it allows the competitors to copy everything. They're also arguably not interested in really good digital sound, so that you go out and buy the latest and greatest in the hope of getting something good, only to be disappointed. That's what keeps audiophiles going in the marketplace, for better or for worse.
But seriously, one can buy a universal DVDCDSACDBluRay player for less than a $100. It'll output all formats to your TV and stereo system. But you didn't really expect that machine to sound exceptional, do you? There are limits. Think about all that technology, more than was able to be dreamed about 40 years ago, in one little box for that little money. All I can say is, it's a loss leader. And we pay for the loss every time we 'upgrade' to something 'better'
Cheers
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Follow Ups
- vintage or not, the Wavelength is not a 'mass produced item' - Tom Schuman 03:27:31 05/31/14 (0)
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