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RE: I sincerely hope you're being serious only about option #1, The Brick DAC™.

The definition of "transport" is arbitrary, which is why I believe my post used the word "computer". As I mentioned in a later post, an SD card itself might be said to contain a "computer" and for that matter my Mytek DAC (which does not contain a transport) also contains a computer.

Obviously, what matters is how the system sounds. If DAC 1 scores a 3 on sound quality with transport A and a 3 on sound quality with transport B, then it is transport independent. One would definitely prefer DAC 2, which scores a 5 with transport A and a 9 with transport B, even though it is not transport independent. And, depending on pricing, one might even prefer DAC 3, which scores a 1 with transport A and a 10 with transport B.

I have no way to evaluate CD players as being perfect, as I do not work in the marketing department of either Sony or Philips. I do not believe it is possible to achieve perfect sound with any PCM format of lower resolution than 768/20 or DSD of lower resolution than DSD128. However, I have heard 192/24 and DSD64 recordings that sound excellent, certainly better than any consumer level tape or LP playback that I've heard.

The gold standard for converter perfection is comparison of a live microphone feed, vs. a live microphone feed passed through an ADC -storage- DAC loop. (The storage part is needed because without it it is possible for jitter in the ADC clock and DAC clock to cancel each other out. For evaluating other qualities of the DAC it may be more convenient to eliminate the storage portion.) The problem with this approach is that the ranking of DACs will differ if the ADCs used are different. There is no technical standard or specification of which is correct, and seldom does one get to even know what the equipment used was in making a recording. Because of the lack of these standards, the entire concept of perfection in a DAC is pretty much empty. So I would say, forget about "perfect" DACs. However, it would be possible to tell if a great sounding DAC has "perfect" isolation, by garnering a large collection of poor to excellent transports and listening to how the DAC sounds with these. Of course one would need a suitable set of recordings that would provoke various artifacts that less than stellar performing products might produce and a sufficiently good analog and acoustic back end.



Tony Lauck

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

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