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In Reply to: RE: DAC with Wyred4Sound modified Sonos posted by Mcanaday@princeton.edu on November 29, 2014 at 05:43:10
Inherent to the DA conversion is that you get an alias, an image of the audio right after the half of the sample rate.
To protect your gear and preserve sound quality, you need a filter.
As you want to cover the audible range (up to 20 kHz) and in case of CD quality ½ fs=44/2= 22 kHz, this filter must be very steep. Steep filters (brick wall) introduces all kind of artifacts.
If you output at e.g. 96 kHz, all of course remains the same but this time you get an alias starting at 96/2= 48 kHz.
This is far away from the upper threshold of out hearing hence the filtering will be less intrusive or one can decide to use a smoother one.
This might explain why Wired4Sound states that the 96 kHz option is to be preferred.
I’m afraid you run into a nasty paradox.
Normally DACs upsample (most of the time with a factor 8)
You want a NOS DAC, one that doesn’t upsample.
If you feed it CD quality with the upsampling option of the W4S, you are upsampling.
This defies the purpose of a NOS imho.
The Well Tempered Computer
Follow Ups:
Hi Roseval-
Ah thanks. It sounds like I don't want a NOS dac then. But what, in your opinion, is the optimum way to configure the Sonos unit, if I am only planning on streaming lossless cd quality through Tidal or something like it? 44.1 or 96? Thanks again...
Sonos does 16/44 only.
I heard it once and I do think its internal DAC middle of the road.
Step 1 might be to get the unit and see what it does in your system.
Step two might be to combine it with an external DAC.
Sonos SPDIF out is probably not the best there is too but a lot of DACs are pretty good in coping with input jitter.
The Terradac you mentioned, re-clockes. A lot of DACs use asynchronous sample rate conversion to cope with the input jitter.
If you are still not happy step 3 might be the W4S mod.
The Well Tempered Computer
I have the Sonos Connect (with Deezer Elite beta), and use it with my (heavily modded) upsampling MSB Link III DAC, Monarch Audio DIP, and JISCO jitter attenuator. Although my digital equipment is more than 10 years old, the sound from the Connect is at least as good as the Pioneer DV-525 I was using as a transport playing CDs. (I have not listened to the DAC in the Connect.) In fact, I'm so impressed by it that I reach for it before I even think of finding a CD.
The streaming portion of the the Connect is a good piece of equipment. If you buy it, don't give up on it until you've tried a decent external DAC.
There is no DAC that will reduce the jitter of the Sonos enough to be interesting IME. Jitter reduction in most DACs is insufficient, and sometimes even making things worse if they resample using an inferior clock powered from an inferior power supply.
I disagree. The output from my Sonos through a Schiit or Peachtree DAC is outstanding.
Compared to what?
Anything else that I've tried over the past 60 years. There was no comparison implied in my comment; only my observation about the sound of my two systems using Sonos.
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