Digital Drive

Inexpensive DAC with a de-emphasis buttom

213.33.155.58

akolegov

I am looking for an inexpensive (probably Chinese) DAC with a de-emphasis button, in hope that it will give better sound when connected to my MHZS 88F CD player and will help to eliminate excessive sibilance recorded in some CDs (mostly old pop/jazz music).

Follow Ups:

An inexpensive external Tube Buffer might help - steveassante@comcast.net 08:19:44 06/08/12 (0)
You might want to see if Audio Advisor (or someone similar : The Cable Co. , etc.) carry an inexpensive external tube buffer
Another thought came to mind . You might want to try ripping some of these troublesome CDs to your PC & then burn a CDr of them. Burned discs have less jitter

Try it, it's free (except for the CDr). You would be surprised at how much better the burned clone of many CDs sound .

Edits: 06/08/12
RE: Inexpensive DAC with a de-emphasis buttom - rick_m 07:28:25 06/08/12 (1)
The deemphasis is turned on automatically in your player by a flag in the data headers, there isn't a button but there might be an indicator. I don't know if players are required to support the function now or not, I think they were initially. As the poster below mentioned it wasn't used very much, unfortunately IMHO.

My preamp has tone controls and filters available and I use them if necessary to tame unwieldy recordings or sources. Unfortunately they are becoming more necessary than ever thanks to the the distortion, compression and clipping on the radio and Internet streams as the suits fight the loudness wars.

Paradoxically, sometimes the answer is to turn UP the treble. While it increases it's level, it also adds some lead compensation which may be the very thing... But without the knobs you're completely at the mercy of someone else's whims and sadly even switched tone controls are now out of vogue. Ironically a manufacturer can gain audiophile "cred" AND decrease their CTM by leaving out tone controls. "Let them buy cables..."

Rick
- RE: Inexpensive DAC with a de-emphasis buttom - Tony Lauck 11:09:08 06/08/12 (0)
  When dealing with these bad recordings the only button that is really useful is the "off" switch.
  
  Tony Lauck
  
  "Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
RE: Inexpensive DAC with a de-emphasis buttom - mls-stl 04:11:01 06/08/12 (0)
Unless your collection consists mainly of Japanese CD pressings from the early 80s, there was no pre-emphasis used on the format.

If you've got excessive sibilance, I'd wonder if you shouldn't be looking elsewhere in your system for the cause. Sibilance is not associated with the the high frequency range but rather undue emphasis in the upper midrange, around 3 KHz to 6 or 7 KHz.

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