moshulu;131906 Wrote: > For an amateur like me, DACs are mysterious things. After putting > together my Monica2 (a battery-powered non-oversampling DAC that uses a > single TDA1545A chip) I fed in a 2 kHZ “sine wave” signal > from a test CD. I looked at Monica’s analog output, compared > with that of my garden-variety Denon deck (see link to picture below). > I should have anticipated what I saw, but I admit to being shocked. No > way was I going to feed that ugly waveform into my nice, > painfully-constructed, 300B monoblocks! Still, what’s an honest > DAC supposed to do? All it has is the 44.1 kHz data samples; > everything else is guesswork and interpolation. For all it knows, the > original sound WAS a step function. In any case, I figured that the > high frequency components in the steps were probably not going to be > amplified in my monoblocks, transmitted through my cables, reproduced > by my speakers, or heard by my ears. The final proof, of course, was > in the listening. Monica produces a lovely sound, superior to the > Denon deck and, IMHO, to the Squeezebox. > > http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f165/moshulu/DSCN0563b.jpg > [Top trace: Monica; bottom trace: Denon]
Please tell me this is a joke? If a 2Khz sine wave really looks like that staircase going into a wide bandwidth amp it will sound 'orrible! If you think that sounds better you've probably developed an affection for that particular type of distortion. Of course, the amp will probably be doing the filtering of the 44.1khz artifacts anyway... I'd rather prefer my sine waves to look like sine waves. (and PF is correct - that nice sine wave out of the Denon is not a guess - it's the result of what looks like well-implemented anti-alias filtering. I note with some amusement that Philips themselves describe this device as "suitable for a clock radio" - that sounds about right :o) -- Phil Leigh ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phil Leigh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=85 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=26598 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
