pfarrell Wrote: > On Mon, 2006-01-09 at 11:08 -0800, Mike Hanson wrote: > > rmasson Wrote: > > > For those who are curious, I could find no audible difference > between > > > the coax and optical digital out when fed through the DAC-1. This > is > > > not really surprising though as the DAC-1 is apparently designed > to > > > eliminate "all" jitter effects. > > I expected the same, but in my case the difference was startling, > > almost as if I were listening to a completely different source! > Don't > > ask me why, because I haven't a clue. BTW, the coax was the better > of > > the two. > > Interesting, My SB1/g feeding my Benchmark DAC-1 was completely > indistinguishable from coax versus toslink. > The switch on the front makes it easy to switch between them. I should clarify my testing, which may explain why there's a difference in my case. I'm using a fairly good RCA-to-BNC coax cable, but the Toslink optical cable is a $5 special. Considering proper terminations are supposedly a common problem with optical cables, the difference could very likely be due to that. If I had more time and a greater interest, I might try a different cable. However, all of my systems are using coax, so I don't have any "good" Toslink cables to use in the comparison.
For now, we'll assume that my test was flawed. I'm still somewhat curious, though, as this summation would suggest that I'm losing data with Toslink (enough to cause a notable change in the sound), but it doesn't really sound "bad"; it's just not as good as the coax option. If it's really data loss, then I would expect to hear something more akin to distortion, but there's nothing obviously "harsh". It just sounds thinner, with a slightly different tonal balance (especially in the midrange). -=> Mike Hanson <=- www.boxsoft.net -- Mike Hanson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mike Hanson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=136 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19850 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
