Quick question/poll

[admin_exported]

Ok now im obsessing about this!

I recently bought a denon pma510ae and mordaunt short aviano 1 speakers with a DACmagic.

I have been relatively unimpressed with the minor change the DAC has made to my sound from napster. Shall i trade both the denon and DAC back into richer sounds and spend the 450 on a better amp instead minus the DACmagic? Which is likely to have the better sound?ARgh!

Cheers.

John

 

[Andrew Everard]

I think the Napster download/streaming formats may be more of a limiting factor.

 

[Anonymous]

I thought the whole point of the dac was to upsample, therefore improving lesser quality files? Otherwise whats the point in one?

 

[Andrew Everard]

The DAC can upsample, yes. but in so doing may well simply emphasise the poor quality of some low-bitrate audio files. It can't put back quality lost in the encoding process.

 

[Tonestar1]

The point of an external DAC is to provide a far better digital to analogue conversion than you will get with an internal one. If the source is low quality then the upsampling is only guessing at the bits in between. The less it has to estimate the more realistic the sound will be.

You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear.

 

[Alec]

I'm afraid I too think the tracks are'nt up to snuff. I also once got a DAC to be unimpressed with lower bit rate songs, but was much more impressed with lossless tracks, and there was some improvement with 320kbps MP3s too.

 

[Anonymous]

Jon,

Looking at previous posts, am I right in thinking your DACmagic is connected to your PC via TOSLINK from an Audigy 2 Soundcard ?

If so there is your problem, the Audigy chip is locked at 48khz upsamples 16/44.1->16/48 in a very nasty way, I had an Audigy 4 and those soundcards ruin music and put me off Creative Soundcards for life even though the later X-Fi models fixed these issues.

Trying using the USB connection, I am 99.9% convinced the Audigy is the weak link in the chain.

Also compare a CD played back from the PC to the DacMagic via the Audigy, and then using the USB connection. If you are using Vista, install Foobar & the WASAPI audio plugin (or Kernel Streaming plugin XP) as this will potentially allow you to send unmolested "bit perfect" sound to the DacMagic via the USB connection and will highlight the shortcomings of the Audigy in a very big way.

 

[John Duncan]

Ooo did someone say poll?

(EDIT - damn, I can't put a poll in a reply)

 

[Andrew Everard]

Aha! Hoist with his own tabard! Or something...

 

[Anonymous]

Napster is what it is and using a highly compressed format, so no DAC is going to make it sound as good as a lossless format.

That being said at home via Sonos it provides a pleasant and useful listening experience.

 

[Anonymous]

I have to slightly disagree with the above analogy.

When a high quality external DAC is fed with unmolested lossy file formats sucha as mp3/Spotify etc, the sound quality is suprisingly good IMHO. The free Ogg based 160kbs Spotifty streams (which could be improved under Windows if you could only use WASAPI or Kernel streaming insted of Direct Sound) sound excellent in a good system.

I have a lot of EAC/192kbs Lame VBR MP3 CD rips which sound fantastic when kernel streamed to a Quad 99CDP2 "bit perfect" and it is a struggle to distinguish them from the originals. I should also add I use the very high quality Libmad codec for mp3 playback (http://www.underbit.com/products/mad/) so the Quad is fed 24bit PCM via SPDIF.