barrygordon;418137 Wrote: > My assumption is that if I play my music out of the optical connection > on any Slim Devices player there should be no difference in sound as > DAC quality of the player does not come into it. Am I correct in that > assumption? That is, a $2000 Transporter and a $120 Receiver should > sound exactly the same as far as their optical outputs are concerned.
Let's assume CD-quality (16 bits per channel x 44.1kHz) is good enough and you aren't going to be buying high-rez FLAC downloads from audiophile music labels. Then, the only difference could be the clock stability of the source and jitter on edge transitions. The external DAC has to lock onto and recover the clock from a single stream containing both the data and an implied clock. The quality of that waveform, in particular the slope of the transitions between ones and zeros can make a difference to how jittery the recovered clock winds up. True, this is more a function of the counter measures taken inside the DAC, but to a degree it depends on the transmitted waveform quality as well. In fact, that is a reason that an electrical coax connection has the potential to be better, as it can be made very wide band. If the bandwidth is constrained, then you have a low pass filter which causes previous bits to influence the present bit, also known as ISI. This again causes edge-jitter which can impact the quality of the recovered clock. All this can sound like audiophilia nervosa, but it is scientifically quantifiable and mathematically correct. The only question is how important is it? Most good, modern DACs are designed to mitigate such effects to a large degree. So, depending on the level of ambition you have for your sound quality and the quality of your down-stream audio equipment you may not be able to hear the difference. In fact, the balance of probability is that you won't hear a difference. My summary: Using a Transporter purely for digital-out makes *most* sense if you think you are going to collect music in higher-than-CD resolution, but also has some theoretical justification if you are going all-out for a no-compromise system and really want to avoid all possible sources of jitter, real or imagined. (But in that case, use the coax output.) -- dsdreamer ---------------------- "Dreamer, easy in the chair that really fits you..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ dsdreamer's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=12588 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=62713 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
