Gerrardasnails:manicm:
Gerrardasnails:JohnNewman:JohnDuncan:Unless you *must* get rid of some boxes, I;d stick with what you;ve got. Stick a streamer in the back of the DM for better (and better value) results... Hey John, Forgive me for being naive, however I'm struggling to understand why a lossless file transmitted digitally through a streamer, will produce a better result than the uncompressed data on the cd also being transmitted digitally to the dac magic. Assuming that the cables are of a good quality, there should be very little difference between the data that the DACMagic has to work with, or are there issues around jitter etc from the cd player? Not disagreeing as I've not heard either, I'm just curious. Thanks Think about it John, with a cd transport, the information has to be taken from the disc, corrected and made sure that everything is ok before being passed on to the DAC part of the cd player. With lossless files, that has already been taken care of and the information is sent straight to the DAC.
I think this argument is becoming a bit dogmatic - to an extent. Newer CD players with all their error correction duties would then all sound rubbish and that would be the be all and end all of that. And that is patently not the case.
I'm sure the soft/PC route can be capable of astounding results but one also has to forget the technicalities and listen.
And personal taste also comes into this and hifi in general. I've gleaned from the forums here over time and am obviously generalising to a great extent but it would seem some prefer a more rounded sound and others like myself a more open, transparent sound - perhaps at some cost of 'brightness'. WHF's ripping listening test seemed to bear this out as well - personal preference definitely played its part.
I didn't quite say that. Of course cd player still sound good. I was just saying that eradicating the transport process will make a difference. The 740c with cd for instance would not better than a lossless file sent straight to the DAC in the 740C.
OK, makes sense. The difference in quality between the cdplayer + dac & PC + dac is going to be determined by the quality of the error correction taking place in the CD player.