Recent content by TomSawyer

For the same reason anyone would buy an expensive CD player rather than a cheap one - whilst there's no guarantee, more money available to the designer opens up the possibility of a better sounding unit.

If you only want to stream Spotify, then a lot of what a streamer can offer over a simple DAC is not relevant. The differences that remain are that with a simple DAC your mobile device remains in the music stream as you play whereas a Spotify Connect streamer pulls the music directly from...

I agree with all of the above, particularly positioning. I've had two pairs of Tannoy dual concentrics and have found them best facing flat front. The tweeters seem incredibly directional to me so turning the speaker allows you to choose how much or little tweeter you want in your mix. Also...

The last one was the NP-S2000 according to the website. It does internet radio but is shown as discontinued. I can't think of a network streamer that doesn't but there may be some.

I heard the Dave through a pair of Chord monoblocks at a dealers fairly recently. I can't recall the transport feeding it but it was into Dynaudio Confidence C4 speakers. I wasn't there to audition anything as expensive, this kit was obviously the centre-piece of the listening room and so was...

Hi, what connection type will you use from the laptop - coaxial, optical or USB? I assume the latter but the reason for asking is that at this kind of price, the choice is much greater with the former two. Could you stretch to £800 - the Marantz HD-AMP1 is a smart looking bit of kit that packs...

Thanks Andy, I'll take a look. How useful it will be with regard to this particular debate on the forum will depend on what output can be extracted to post as evidence. A null test (or not), a set of comparible wave traces and a pair of sound files for the forum to blind test should allow the...

And thats exactlythe point (forgive the pun). People who don't believe the science can't help feeling that the more data points you have, the more accurately or smoothly the DAC will reconstruct the waveform and hence "believe" in hi-res. The science says, that 44.1kHz is all you need to...

Hi Shadders, i think you misunderstand, I'd put both files through the same DAC one after the other and record the resultant output wave then compare. Simply subtracting the digital waveform doesn't categorically prove 16/44 is as good as 24/96 because obviously there are differences in the...

Hi Shadders, sure, but its inaudible, not because of frequency but because the amplitude is negligible. Like I say, the true test, in my simple mind, would be to get a DAC to turn then both into reconstructed output waveforms and compare.

Sorry to post this in two places but there are two very similar discussions going on. Essentially, I've done here what you say but instead of ABXing it and listening to the difference, I've subtracted one from the other to see if there was anything left. The problem with listening is that it's...

Thanks Andy, I'm not. I'll check it out.

I've downloaded a hi-res sample from the Sony website into Audacity and created an exact replica using copy/paste: I then downsampled/reduced bit-depth to 16/44: I then inverted the lower sound file to create a mirror image (I also zoomed in to make it easier to see): I then added the...

Forgive me, David, but you've misunderstood your first point I think. 24/96 down sampled to 16/44 sounds the same as the original 24/96 is what's being said. The point being to demonstrate that the same wave can be just as accurately represented with a lot less data. The reason the experiment...

A high end, Clearaudio record player, possibly including an arm and a cartridge with that budget.