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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: I did not like a DAC. Can I generalize . . . ? posted by dave789 on November 8, 2014 at 20:50:46:
The sort of subjective reaction you describe has long been common when listening to digital playback. While there is that impending sense that something unpleasant is about to occur on loud peaks, such playback is usually also accompanied by a general lack of enjoyment even during relatively soft portions of music over longer term listening. Taken together, these express the dissappointment that many audiophiles have had, and many still have, with digital since the format was commercially introduced decades ago.The good news is that I've found this unpleasantness and general lack of musical enjoyment not to be endemic to digital audio as a technology, or even to a given D/A chip technology. Instead, it seems to be much more a function of the implementation details of the DAC unit as a system. A DAC unit not only contains a D/A chip(s), but digital reconstruction filters, speed sensitive analog circuits, analog filters, voltage regulators, noise sensitive clock management, and more. I suspect that the reason so many DAC units seem to produce the same less than fully satisfying sound quality has mostly to do with their having very similar implementations. With digital playback, more so than with analog, the implementation details alone seem to make or break the sound - more often, breaking it.
The bad news is that this doesn't leave the consumer with much in the way of a reliable list of technical features to look for when shopping. Unfortunatetly, it seems that the proof of a given DAC unit design is only to be found in the listening.
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Ken Newton
Edits: 11/09/14 11/09/14 11/09/14 11/09/14 11/09/14
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Follow Ups
- Good news and bad news. - knewton 06:41:23 11/09/14 (1)
- Agreed. Mature, older technologies. - jusbe 16:37:03 11/09/14 (0)
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