Hi John! On Thu, Feb 05, 2009 at 10:39:05PM +0000, John Molohan wrote: > > Do you have digital input/ouput on your amp/shuttle? > > > > I have two Klipsch speackers on an Onkyo receiver connected to my box > > with an SPDIF cable and it's quite satisfying. The advantage is that it > > works with surround as well. > > > > > My shuttle does yes, my amp no but that may be upgraded in the future. > What I'm curious about is the quality coming out of the PC over digital > (there are obviously factors that effect analogue quality). As far as I > would have thought it's a digital stream so it will be perfect all the > way to your amp and the quality of your amp and it's DAC is all that > should matter.
Basically yes. But there are a few things you need to take care of: First you need a soundcard that doesn't resample to 48kHz. I had a Soundblaster Live and really hated it for that. The quality of 44.1kHz playback was awful (like most AC97 compatible cards that SB Live has a really bad upsampler). Very soon I activated software upsampling in Mplayer and then the quality was OK. Next thing is the DAC. The guys in the high end shop will tell you horror stories about jitter and so on (basically to convince you to spend several thousand instead of a few hundred bucks for a DAC), but it's better to ignore all this. Unless your source (PC, CD-player, ...) is completely broken there won't be much jitter in the signal. The DAC itself uses a PLL to regenerate the word clock (eg 48kHz) from the signal stream (some 2MHz) - which eliminates jitter quite well. Also remember that there's a FIFO before the DAC, so jitter from the digital input should never make it through to the DAC. Back to your original question: I use a cheap M-Audio Delta Audiophile 2496 card in my freevo box, connected digitally to my Behringer SRC2496 (a very decent DAC, especially for the price). The M-Audio card outputs digital signals from 8kHz (IIRC) up to 96kHz without resampling, so the quality is really fine. Although the analog outputs of the card are very good, I switched to digital simply because I needed some 4m cable between my freevo box and my amp (which is too much for unbalanced analog connections IMHO). so long, Hias ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Create and Deploy Rich Internet Apps outside the browser with Adobe(R)AIR(TM) software. With Adobe AIR, Ajax developers can use existing skills and code to build responsive, highly engaging applications that combine the power of local resources and data with the reach of the web. Download the Adobe AIR SDK and Ajax docs to start building applications today-http://p.sf.net/sfu/adobe-com _______________________________________________ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
