Munroe;681938 Wrote: > This whole arena of thought is a bit hard for me to pin down to be > honest. I am a bit concrete in my approach to things. So I sway to > more toward a concrete solution for things, which may not exist in > audio. A question having several answers and none of them may be > right, starts a migraine. > > All I know is that I have auditioned only one DAC, the 100D for $599, > and it sounded very open and "airy" if that's even a term, compared to > my existing CD player. I like the feeling of space in the music, as if > you can hear the studio in some respect. With the Focals, I have the > highs in spades, but looking for a product or solution that will also > add more natural sound and space without breaking the bank. > > My first try was a software solution, and although it did seem to > change the sound for the better, I could never pin down what optimal > setting people could agree on. Not that I think Logitech didn't do > that themselves, but right or wrong, my experience with AppleTV's have > told me consumer electronics sometimes go high on convenience and have > fidelity as a second thought. > > That's what has driven me to explore DACs as the manufacturing > companies like Naim, Moon, Rega, etc. have already done the "head > scratching" within their product's hardware, and I have to just plug it > in, initiate a digital stream and not worry about it.
Let me then be concrete and propose you a pragmatical budget approach that works fine for me (ordered by importance): 1) Stock SBT (you already have) -> 300$/ 2) S-Booster BOTW Linear PSU (few will pretend that a good PSU does not improve sound) -> 150$/ or DIY if you like electronics and have time to spend instead of money 3) V-DAC II (budget DAC but with high value4money) -> 250$/ 4) V-PSU (linear PSU for V-DAC) -> 150 $/ 5) Software tweaks: TT3.0 default is good (even with screen on) with little effort -> 0$/ (of course, you can also skip steps 2 to 4 but you would stay where you are) 6) Hardware tweaks: good cables (speaker/interconnect/data)and networking -> a lot of time and from some 100$ up to $$$$$ but then you are lost in the audiomania To come back to my first post, I am not a fanatic of the jitter explanation and can not prove or demonstrate the incidence of jitter on the sound but it is one of the few explanations why all above would have an impact on the sound coming out of a DAC, since the input is supposed to be bit perfect. I can report at least for myself that what is behind my DAC has an incidence on the sound quality. To tell you an anecdote about this: when I bought my linear PSU for the Touch, I got a drastic improvement of the sound from my analog output (trust me) but it was worse out of the DAC connected to the digital output. Eventually I found I had a low cost switched PSU polluting my AC outlet and when I removed it, the sound of the DAC became ways better. Another important factor is certainly the immunity to electromagnetic interferences that are flowing all around the system and induce additional noise in any way, so better PSU and cables immunity has also an incidence (that might be minor or major depending on the environment). One forgets sometimes that a DAC has also an analog stage that is not more immune to external noise sources than any other device within the system. -- evdplancke ------------------------------------------------------------------------ evdplancke's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=43147 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=92801
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