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RE: Keep an open mind;

Posted by Tony Lauck (A) on August 9, 2012 at 05:57:22

In Reply to: Keep an open mind; posted by fmak on August 8, 2012 at 13:38:12:

Obviously, if the Firewire connection works better than the USB connection I will use that where possible. There are also differences in the many ways the Mytek Stereo192-DSD DAC can be set up and I will explore the new combinations, which include various clock modes, driver and application buffering settings, etc.. The level display can be switched on/off, there are filter choices, there are analog and digital gain control options, etc. If a particular interface is sensitive to digital cable my tendency will be to avoid that interface, just as I did 20 years ago when I discovered (to my amazement) that the optical ST interface in my two box Proceed CD player sounded worse than the coax.

Tweaking the computer and digital cable is a poor substitute for a better DAC, as the need to do so indicates that the sound could have been better if the DAC had been better designed or built. Hence my comment that if the differences I heard were significant I would consider getting a better DAC. It is also possible that any differences I might hear would be due to interference with my powered speakers or their cabling, hence the need for experimentation to isolate this possibility. One has to understand the root cause of a problem if one wants to make the largest possible improvement. Operating incrementally on a "cut and try" basis without proper instrumentation and theoretical understanding can be an immense waste of time, something I learned over 50 years ago when tweaking a Dynaco amplifier. (This is particularly true when the differences are marginal, i.e. cannot be heard 100% of the time when doing blind tests, as the psycho-acoustic noise turns the search process into a random walk.)



Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

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