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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: The PC as a Digital Music Source. posted by rp1@surfnetusa.com on June 27, 2007 at 01:29:54:
Rp,
The K-mixer, as it turns out, is not the big evil people think it is. If you are running one stream (a stereo stream counts as one) the mixer leaves it alone. Benchmark media's engineers tested the K-mixer with a known digital stream in and got a bit perfect stream out (this using audio-precision gear). The people at Lynx audio are also not concerned about the K-mixer AS LONG as all you are doing is listening to a single stream stereo track...as in redbook cd. If you are recording, then of course the latency is important.
I am aware of the Benchmark view on this, but on my system, DS doesn't sound as good as ASIO. All I am doing is playing back ripped cds, no recording, etc. Perhaps I have some setting messed up, but it sure does sound better with ASIO. Several others report the same.
We built the K2 machine using the Lynx 2b sound card. My personal machine uses the same sound card sending AES/EBU out to my benchmark some ways away from the music server. When using the Lynx card the digital output, on redbook, was 44.1k indicating no problem with the K-mixer changing the sampling rate. DVD was, of course 48 and 96khz.
I am soooo glad to hear you say that you have the Lynx 2b...so do I. While I can't think of why it would matter in regards to the kmixer, I am not using the digital outs, but the internal dacs, yet it does change the sound on the DS output. COmpared to ASIO, it just sounds flat and veiled.
Folks that talk about wmp10 or above "sounding bad" have something else going on...often the problem is in the ripping. Microsoft has included a good error-correcting algorithym in media player but, for some unknown reason, it is turned off by default! With it turned on before ripping, the sound is as good as anything out there (we ran listening tests with audiphiles comparing Levinson, Esoteric and other stand-alone cdps as foils...the testing sources were redbook cd music). Turned off, unless the cd-rom drive is very good, it can sound like ass.
I recently downloaded WMP11 and it really does sound different. THe bass is all over the place and unlistenable in comparison to Foobar and KS (this is a different rig). But, the files played were ripped with winamp, itunes, and eac. I checked all the playback settings I could find, turing off the eq, etc. But nothing I did made it sound better. Compared to Foobar, it doesn't seem at all to be neutral. I agree with Dan on this one.
The engineers at Lynx feel that the asio driver in Foobar to be a poor implimentation leading, sometimes, to a poorer bit performance than that of XP
What are you saying here?? XP is an operating system, isn't it? So how can a player operating in that operating system sometimes lead to poorer bit performance than the operating system?? DO you mean "IN XP"?? But yes, I have heard that the implementation is poor. One reason is that the volume control still works in Foobar with ASIO. In winamp with ASIO , there is no volume control, and as I understand it, there shouldn't be with ASIO. But it does sound pretty good at least to my ears.
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- RE: The PC as a Digital Music Source. - Dawnrazor 05:35:51 06/27/07 (0)
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