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In Reply to: Re: sb3 power upgrade posted by mls-stl on February 9, 2007 at 20:28:00:
thanks. i agree it shouldn't make any difference its just ones and zeros. but i ran my cd player and sb3 into the same interconnecter and dac. and for some reason the cd player sounded fuller??! (its a njoe 4000) I love the convenience of the sb. but trying to figure out what is causing the difference in performance. the only other thing could be if i didn't rip my cds at full rez or something like that?
Follow Ups:
The Njoe 4000 probably sounds fuller because it has tubes in its output stage. I owned the NT4000 with the upsampler and all the extras and its a great sounding cd player, if the Sb3 even comes close to the sound quality of the NT4000 it would be quite a compliment to the SB3.
love the njoe. but i was only using it as a transport ..tubes shouldn't make a difference??
Some DACs are more susceptible to external jitter from cables and other factors, so it could be related to that. There could also be the issue of how you ripped your CDs to the hard drive and what format you used. Did you use a lossless format such as FLAC or one of the others? If you used a lossy compression format to rip then it would be no wonder that the SB3 did not sound as good.
It's hard to judge the quality of the digital signal from the resultant sound alone. There is a 'correct' sound - that is, the sound from DAC with a perfect PCM stream - and this may or may not be what you like best. There are types of jitter that cause some DACs to respond with elevated mid-bass as the error correction kicks in (my CD player seems to do this when used as a transport). The sound is distinctly warm, but the resolution is shot.From what I understand, the SB3 uses a linear power supply internally to power the digital side of things, so a linear external PSU probably won't have a huge effect if you're using the digital output exclusively. However, decent linear PSUs are available surplus very inexpensively so there's not much risk in giving one a try.
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