I used to have a Benchmark DAC1 in my system in my SB3 days, but after purchasing a Touch and doing some careful listening with the Touch direct and through the Benchmark, I found that if anything the DAC1 sounded a little forward and slightly grainy in the treble region, but otherwise very similar to the Touch.
I know for sure that the Benchmark DAC1 measures better than the Touch, but since I could not hear it in my system with my ears, it made no sense to keep it. NOS DACs definitely break some rules, but in order to make a very specific trade: elimination of pre-and post-echo. (A similar motivation lies behind the use of apodizing filters in DACs and CD players, but without allowing excessive aliasing.) I don't think use of NOS techniques should be ruled out on principle, even though the presence of some inverted spectrum "music" added into the near-ultransonic region is -prima facie- the wrong thing to do. If you like it in your system, fine, but it's probably not for everyone. Frankly, I just don't think there is a thoroughly good way to reproduce music that has to be band-limited to 22kHz before sampling. That's one half of the damage, the remainder is done by an additional low-pass filter to suppress the aliases, when reconstructing a continuous waveform from the samples. Leaving out the alias suppression filtering clearly avoids further low pass filtering, but cannot remove what was done to make the recording. Everything we do here is some kind of compromise, which why some DACs and CD players offer multiple types of filter shape (e.g., sharp, smooth or minimum phase). None of them is the right answer; the only real solution being significantly faster sampling rates for digital recordings. I was reminded how much of a difference sampling rates make to the overall musical experience by downloading and listening to some of the free samples here: http://www.lessloss.com/high-resolution-audiophile-recordings-c-68.html Listening to the 24-bit/96kHz Bach recordings played though my SB Touch reminded me how wonderfully present, natural and non-fatiguing digital music -can- sound. -- 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=83976 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
